Serving for the Gawds: A Rainbow Serpent Anthology

Serving for the Gawds is a forthcoming transdisciplinary anthology that brings together artists, writers, poets, scholars, and cultural practitioners in a shared exploration of the Rainbow Serpent pantheon, a constellation of Black queer deities that reimagines mythology as a living framework for contemporary artistic, intellectual, and spiritual practice.

Across poetry, visual art, essays, fiction, photography, and experimental forms, contributors engage these deities as evolving artistic languages through which to examine identity, ancestry, desire, technology, ritual, ecology, memory, and collective transformation. Each contribution extends the cosmology in its own way, demonstrating how myth can function as a generative force for imagining new cultural futures. 

Published by Rainbow Serpent, Serving for the Gawds reflects the organization’s commitment to building intellectual and cultural infrastructure alongside its work in sculpture, film, performance, publishing, ritual practice, and emerging technologies. Rather than documenting an existing movement, the anthology participates in the creation of one, bringing together artists from multiple disciplines whose work contributes to an evolving project of Black queer mythogenesis.

The volume features new and previously unpublished work by established and emerging voices, including poetry by Dante Micheaux, paintings by Devan Shimoyama, digital collages by Granville Carroll, photography by Ajamu X, and contributions from an international community of artists and thinkers whose work continues to expand the possibilities of Black queer creative practice.

Serving for the Gawds understands publishing as an act of collective worldbuilding. By inviting artists to elaborate a shared cosmology through their own creative languages, the anthology becomes both an archive of contemporary Black queer thought and a catalyst for new conversations, collaborations, and cultural futures.