Writing & performing

DON'T MAKE ME DO SOMETHING WE'LL BOTH REGRET (STORIES)
TEXAS REVIEW PRESS INNOVATIVE PROSE SERIES, 2022

The stories in "Don't Make Me Do Something We'll Both Regret" are linked by their exploration of queer evil. The mystery of desire and sting of rejection drive a child to violence. Boys enter the forest, naive to what lurks within. A pack of pop stars-turned-lovers strike a terrible bargain to preserve their youth. Its characters are gnostics and mystics, ogres and queens whose defiance of the normative both liberates and confines.

”This book is a confrontation. It makes direct eye contact, and then there's no looking away. I laughed so much, with joy and wonder and fear. God, I loved every bit of it."
—Jac Jemc, author of Total Work of Art and False Bingo

"If Edgar Allan Poe and Dennis Cooper had a child who wrote fanfiction about boy bands, teen dramas, and memes, they’d write something like Don’t Make Me Do Something We’ll Both Regret. Subversive, outrageous, and smart—Jones-Yelvington is one of the most exciting writers working today."
—Eric Nguyen, author of Things We Lost to the Water

“This collection is as uncategorizable as the forms of queer evil that haunt it. Apocrypha for teen pop stars, meet cutes for phantoms-next-door, desires that once uttered, reshape the world: Don’t Make Me Do Something We’ll Both Regret is a glitter ball only Jones-Yelvington can spin. The voice of this book will never leave you.”
—Daniel Allen Cox, author of Mouthquake

Press/Reviews:
Podcast Interview w/ Lindsay Hunter & Alex Higley on I’m A Writer But

Interview with Megan Milks, Grimoire

Reviewed by Patrick Reardon for Third Coast Review

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STRIKE A PROSE: MEMOIRS OF A LIT DIVA EXTRAORDINAIRE
CO•IM•PRESS, 2018

Who, or what is TJY? In this neon-lit chronicle of the rise and fall of literature's first pop star, the diva's trauma memoir collides with the twisted coming of age narrative of his adolescent fanboy, ornamented by the gilded prose poems that constitute the diva's song. The result is a queer exploitation, rather than obliteration, of whatever remains of the distinction between high theory and lowbrow culture, conjuring a space where Lady Gaga meets Valley of the Dolls meets Dennis Cooper meets Deleuze, set to a soundtrack by LaToya Jackson, and where camp's gestural pathos is tugged joyfully into the digital age.

"It's totally time for TJY—a pop star who is also a literary theorist."
—Kathleen Rooney, author of Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

"In much the same way that literally millions of people claim they were at Woodstock, or that tens of thousands will tell you they saw the last Sex Pistols show at Winterland, people will one day tell such untruths about their presence when Jones-Yelvington debuted their LIT DIVA EXTRAORDINAIRE persona. And I am telling you right now: I was there, and now I am Jones-Yelvingtoning down the Sequined Way. You should join me. Better late than never."
—Martin Seay, author of The Mirror Thief

"In Strike a Prose, the prismatic voice/voices/personas/identities of TJY simultaneously reveal and occlude, self-praise and self-deprecate, are joyful and bitchy and vulnerable and demanding. It's like taking a glittery walk in consciousness/memory/fantasy, and it's so good."
—Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, author of Beast Meridian

"Strike a Prose smartly, hilariously reimagines the kunstlerroman as a (lit) celebrity memoir. The result is preposterous, provocative, and affirming!"
—M. Milks, author of Kill Marguerite and Other Stories

Reviews:
”A kaleidoscope of cultural tropes and myths of queer identity—ranging from abuse narratives to Instagram influencers, from bildungsroman to perfume ads—Strike a Prose gleefully scatters both the glitter and litter of LGBTQ psychic residue.”
—Meghan Lamb, Fanzine (read full review)

”In keeping with the inherent element of camp, there is a kind of double consciousness, an awareness of the phenomenon from inside and out, which, here, fuels an ambivalence about the celebrity culture and its mechanisms. Jones-Yelvington celebrates the world-changing power of sequins while recognizing that the world requires changing.”
—Spencer Dew, decomP (read full review)

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COLTON BEHAVIORAL THERAPY (POETRY CHAPBOOK)
GAZING GRAIN PRESS, 2020

Winner of the Gazing Grain 2017 Chapbook Contest.

Judge Camille Rankine on Colton Behavioral Therapy:
"Colton Behavioral Therapy adopts the structure of cognitive behavioral therapy to form its poetry. We move through each moment step by step—'Activating Event: Something Happens;' 'Belief: I Tell Myself;' 'Consequence: I Feel Something'—as we unfold and unpack the anxieties of existing within an imperfect body. Actor/model/singer/heartthrob/teen-wolf Colton Hayes stands in as the obscure object of desire, porcelain paragon of masculine beauty against which the speaker measures themself again and again. Within this frame, Jones-Yelvington interrogates the very notion of beauty, its construction within a white supremacist world, and the how the cages our culture has built of it can hold us captive within our own minds. The speaker turns their gaze inward as the poems struggle through shame, fear, and doubt toward a playful and redemptive sense of love."

Interview with Gazing Grain Press

OUT OF PRINT
email tea@teajonesyelvington.com
for remaining copies.

THIS IS A DANCE MOVIE! (STORIES)
TINY HARDCORE PRESS/CIVIL COPING MECHANISMS, 2017

• Electric Literature’s 15 Best Short Story Collections of 2017

"This is the short story collection as playful dance party among serious things--a remix of pop culture, gay sex and celebrity, ranging from the confectionary to the visionary. A collection of sparks for various fires, from a bold young talent finding his way forward."
—Alexander Chee, author of The Queen of the Night

"Beautifully written in perfectly realized sentences, with dead-on moments of recognition that require the reader to pause and savor the pleasure of rereading, these stories are brilliantly original, sexually frank, even a bit frightening perhaps, but very funny. Surreally, subversively, wonderfully funny."
—Susan Nussbaum, author of Good Kings, Bad Kings

'This is a Dance Movie!' feels like a wound your dear childhood friend begged you to look at, and when you peered in it oozed glitter. This collection leans in, familiar, knowable, and then it dazzles you, leaving you blinking, waiting impatiently for when you can see again to read more."
—Lindsay Hunter, author of Ugly Girls

Reviews/Press:
decomP (review)
Lambda Literary

OUT OF PRINT
email tea@teajonesyelvington.com
for remaining copies.

BECOME ON YR FACE (POETRY)
NEW MICHIGAN PRESS, 2016

Winner of DIAGRAM's 2016 chapbook contest, these poems' feral forms manifest fantasies of queer becoming—from supermodel to ballerina, sex bot to insect, shedding chitin, glamour and goo. 

"When I think about contemporary poetry and its impossible donut shape—by which I mean continuous, obscure, dazzling, interesting, retreating, arriving—I always think about Jones-Yelvington."
—Joyelle McSweeney

"Jones-Yelvington is a glittery moonbeam from my favorite planet, Jupiter."
—Jennifer Tamayo

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EVAN'S HOUSE AND THE OTHER BOYS WHO LIVE THERE
(SHORT FICTION, 2011), IN THEY COULD NO LONGER
CONTAIN THEMSELVES, ROSE METAL PRESS. 

"The collection’s most palpable sense of want, of stifled desire, of lightning-quick loneliness lives under the roof of Jones-Yelvington’s 'Evan’s House and the Other Boys Who Live There.'"

—Amy Kates, flashfiction.net

This collection contains—but just barely—five chapbooks of flash fiction, including the winner of the third annual Rose Metal Press short short chapbook contest, and four of the finalists from the fourth. Dominatrixes and fetishists, face paint and goo, fierce parental love and perverse longings cohabitate in Jones-Yelvington's contribution—"Evan's House and the Other Boys who Live There." 

Reviews:
Lambda Literary
Flashfiction.net
Small Press Book Review

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