Nobody’s Psychic
“This is a story that challenges us to sit with the uncertainties
of who we are and where we are headed.”
In Nobody’s Psychic, Dani Lamorte sets out to define his sense of self and the world in a discordant collection of memories both vivid and surreal. Raised in a church driven by apocalyptic paranoia and homophobic fear, Lamorte had an upbringing marked by a unique tension between wanting to remain invisible and needing to be observed. These competing desires pushed him toward performance, drag, and gardening, each a reflection of the struggle to find and maintain an image. With every encounter, whether in religion, gender, or the natural world—from a prophetess predicting destruction to the kaleidoscope of a drag queen’s sequins—Lamorte delves into what it means to have an image inside and outside the gaze of others.
Nobody’s Psychic defies easy answers, inviting readers to contemplate life’s contradictions in essays that navigate the complexities of feeling unseen and sometimes nonexistent. Interlacing personal reflections with broader cultural and spiritual insights, Lamorte creates a space for change, identity, and the elusive nature of time. This is not a story with a resolution but one that challenges us to sit with the uncertainties of who we are and where we are headed.
Order Nobody’s Psychic
Nobody’s Psychic was published fall 2025 and is available through many retailers:
Read an excerpt in Pittsburgh City Paper!
Praise & Press for Nobody’s Psychic
Nobody’s Psychic wholeheartedly embraces a nonbinary perspective as it may be the solitary path to alleviating human suffering, for it is within the divergences and shifts in memory and perception that the truth of the human experience is unveiled, connections are formed, and empathy takes root.
~Maggie Glover, author of How I Went Red
An emotionally raucous, deeply funny, and theoretically wily examination of the impossibility of living with – or without – the image, Nobody’s Psychic launches a vital new voice in Lamorte, whose rhizomatic thinking and affecting prose bypass the contemporary obsession with didacticism and embrace the ordinary surrealism of everyday existence.
– Alicia Kozma, author of The Cinema of Stephanie Rothman: Radical Acts in Filmmaking
Catty wit will drag you into Dani Lamorte’s book. Once there, you will read sentences possessed by light. Luciferous! But also, plangency and porosity—astonishing nuances of the author’s eye.
A tarantella of unexpected language and sensation, Nobody’s Psychic irradiates with lustrous attitude.– Eva Hayward, author of “Fingeryeyes: Impressions of cup corals”
The memoir is a series of long and sometimes very funny essays covering a lot of ground, from speaking in tongues in Southwestern Pennsylvania to gardening in Tucson. As its subtitle suggests, it’s primarily about the search for identity and about what happens when you can’t quite find it.
An irreverent and vulnerable account of growing up queer among the Evangelical working class of 1990s Appalachia and putting down roots in the Southwest during the pandemic. Between Pittsburgh and Tucson, these beautiful essays are an exercise in discernment—of the origin of demons, memories, phonemes, weeds, photographs, and the (hi)stories we tell ourselves. As Nobody’s Psychic, Dani Lamorte shows us that what we want to see has been right in front of us all along—and if we’re lucky, it might just be fake. Religion, language, plants, and, identity intersect insightfully in this stunning debut. You will not want to put it down.
– Joela Jacobs, author of Animal, Vegetal, Marginal: The German Literary Grotesque from Panizza to Kafka
What happens when an archivist escapes academia and turns their startling intelligence to the ordinary world? Nobody’s Psychic, Dani Lamorte visits an evangelical childhood, the flux of identity grammar, and the Queen Anne’s Lace of steep Pittsburgh lawns, finding in all of them the ways that discernment makes a self.
– Sarah Smith, author of Marilou is Everywhere
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Appalachian Futures
Nobody’s Psychic is part of the University Press of Kentucky’s Appalachian Futures series. Appalachian Futures gives voice to Black, Native, Latinx, Asian, Queer, and other nonwhite or ignored identities within the Appalachian region. Creating space for the voices and stories of Appalachia’s future, this series actively seeks to dismantle harmful stereotypes about Appalachia and its people.
Series Editors: Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle, Davis Shoulders, & Crystal Wilkinson
