Publishing Triangle Award Winners

(l to r: Rowe, Malcolm, Cameron, Liebegott, Forrest)

The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
Joan Larkin, My Body (Hanging Loose Press)
Eileen Myles, Sorry, Tree (Wave Books)
Jennifer Perrine, The Body Is No Machine (New Issues)

The Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry
Steve Fellner, Blind Date with Cavafy (Marsh Hawk Press) [tie]
Daniel Hall, Under Sleep (The University of Chicago Press) [tie]
Henri Cole, Blackbird and Wolf (Farrar Straus Giroux)

The Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction
Myriam Gurba, Dahlia Season (Manic D Press) 
Bob Smith, Selfish and Perverse (Carroll & Graf)
James Cañón, Tales from the Town of Widows (Harper Perennial)

The Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
Janet Malcolm, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (Yale University Press)
Amy Hoffman, An Army of Ex-Lovers (University of Massachusetts Press)
Sharon Marcus, Between Women (Princeton University Press)

The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction
Michael Rowe, Other Men's Sons (Cormorant Books)
Martin Duberman, The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein (Alfred A. Knopf)
Michael S. Sherry, Gay Artists in Modern American Culture (UNC Press)

The Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction
Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You (FSG)
Ali Liebegott, The IHOP Papers (Carroll & Graf)
André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Felicia Luna Lemus, Like Son (Akashic Books)
Brian Malloy, Brendan Wolf (St. Martin's Press)
Armistead Maupin, Michael Tolliver Lives (HarperCollins)
Sarah Schulman, The Child (Carroll & Graf)

The Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement
Katherine V. Forrest

The Publishing Triangle Leadership Award
Carol Seajay
Richard Labonte

Last night's Publishing Triangle awards ceremony started with Kate Clinton telling jokes about recent politics, a state so dire she's been spending more time with novels: "I read Mrs. Dalloway. It was like reading The Hours in the original." The poetry winners present, Joan Larkin and Daniel Hall, were eloquent and brief. A woman who described herself as "so not Myriam Gurba" read her thank yous for her, and Ali Liebegott was moving as she cried, unable to speak, then recovered to express her deep gratitude and hint at difficult circumstances. She is clearly a writer to watch, having won a Lammy for her previous novel, The Beautifully Worthless, written in verse, and being nominated for another Lammy for this book. Now that Carroll & Graf has been shut down, a major publisher needs to sign Liebegott.

Peter Cameron's winning novel Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is also nominated for a Lammy, and, very seriously now, you must read it. Reviews were stupendous and you have no excuse: It's brief, inexpensive, funny, endearing, wise. Buy it for friends.. They'll thank you.

Janet Malcolm was very elegant accepting her award for Two Lives, and Michael Rowe claimed to be "much too Canadian" to stay cool about his win, which may have been the evening's surprise, beating Michael Sherry's widely praised Gay Artists in Modern American Culture and Martin Duberman's impressive The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein from Knopf.


Accepting her leadership award, Carol Seajay was the only person to criticize mainstream publishing outright, insisting they need to spend more money marketing to lgbt readers now that many gay newspapers and bookstores have gone out of business and no longer promote their books for them. Watch for her gay books blog coming soon. Richard Labonte told a great story about growing up in remote, northern Canada and his life changing discovery, in the town's small library, of classic gay novels discarded by the "bachelor officers" of the nearby military base. Ending the night, Katherine V. Forrest spoke about her career and the vital importance of fiction, especially work by Jane Rule, John Rechy, Andrew Holleran, John Preston, and Paul Monette. She quoted Monette as saying, "Gay men and lesbians belong in each other's lives and in each other's books." She gave Sarah Schulman (also nominated for a Lammy for her novel The Child)  a special shout out, to heavy applause. And she quoted another literary friend who said of gay people, "Ours are the only untold stories."