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October Mourning

A Song for Matthew Shepard

by Lesléa Newman

Length 1 hour 19 minutes

Language English

Narrators Emily Beresford, Luke Daniels, Tom Parks, Nick Podehl, Kate Rudd, Christina Traister & Lesléa Newman

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Summary
About the author

On the night of October 6, 1998, a gay twenty-one-year-old college student named Matthew Shepard was lured from a Wyoming bar by two young men, savagely beaten, tied to a remote fence, and left to die.

Gay Awareness Week was beginning at the University of Wyoming, and the keynote speaker was Lesléa Newman, discussing her book Heather Has Two Mommies. Shaken, the author addressed the large audience that gathered, but she remained haunted by Matthew’s murder.

October Mourning, a novel in verse, is her deeply felt response to the events of that tragic day. Using her poetic imagination, the author creates fictitious monologues from various points of view, including the fence Matthew was tied to, the stars that watched over him, the deer that kept him company, and Matthew himself.

More than a decade later, this stunning cycle of sixty-eight poems serves as an illumination for readers too young to remember, and as a powerful, enduring tribute to Matthew Shepard’s life.

LGBTQIA+ Fiction YA Fiction

Lesléa Newman is the author of more than sixty books for readers of all ages, including the children’s classic Heather Has Two Mommies, as well as the young adult novel Jailbait, the middle-grade novel Hachiko Waits, and the adult poetry collection Still Life with Buddy. Her award-winning short story “A Letter to Harvey Milk” has been adapted for the stage. She has been awarded poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation and is on the faculty of Spalding University’s MFA brief-residency in writing program. She is also a former poet laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts. In addition, she works closely with the Matthew Shepard Foundation as a member of their speakers’ bureau. She has visited schools all over the country giving her presentation “He Continues to Make a Difference: The Story of Matthew Shepard.” Lesléa Newman lives in Holyoke, Massachusetts.