April 29, 2011—The 23rd Annual Triangle Awards, honoring the best lesbian and gay fiction, nonfiction, and poetry published in 2010, were presented last night at the Tishman Auditorium of the New School ( 66 West 12th Street, New York City ) at 7 p.m. Sponsored by Alfred A. Knopf, Farrar Straus Giroux, and HarperCollins, with support from Curtis Brown, Ltd., the ceremony was free and open to the public, with a reception afterward.
The Publishing Triangle, the association of lesbians and gay men in publishing, began honoring a gay or lesbian writer for his or her body of work a few months after the organization was founded in 1989, and has now partnered with the Ferro-Grumley Literary Awards to present an impressive array of awards each spring.
Alan Hollinghurst is the 2011 recipient of the Publishing Triangle's Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, named in honor of the legendary editor of the 1970s and 1980s. Hollinghurst, a novelist, scholar, and activist, won the Man Booker prize for his fourth novel, The Line of Beauty, in 2004. A professor at University College in London, he is a published poet and has translated Racine's Bazajet. He has also edited several books, including a volume of poems by A. E. Housman and Three Novels by Ronald Firbank. Since his dazzling debut, The Swimming Pool Library, in 1988, Hollinghurst has been regarded as one of the best novelists writing in English in our time. His other books are The Folding Star, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction ( 1994 ) , and The Spell ( 1998 ) . His new novel, The Stranger's Child, will be published this October by Alfred A. Knopf. The Bill Whitehead Award is given to a man in odd-numbered years and to a woman in even years, and the winner receives $3000. Michael Kaye, a professor at Hunter College and the CUNY graduate center, presented the award; Nicholas Latimer of Knopf read a thank-you from Hollinghurst while accepting the prize. "I won't pretend that I feel ready for such an award, or had ever anticipated one," Hollinghurst stated. "But I accept it eagerly, and in the generous spirit in which it is given—not ( I think ) as a discreet suggestion that I've done enough, but as an encouragement to carry on."
The Publishing Triangle established its poetry awards in 2001. Thomas Keith, one of the judges, and Publishing Triangle Chair Carol Rosenfeld presented these awards, which carry a prize of $500.
The Thom Gunn Award honors the author of The Man with Night Sweats ( 1992 ) , Boss Cupid ( 2000; the winner of the very first Triangle Award for Gay Male Poetry ) , and other works. The British-born Gunn, a longtime resident of San Francisco, died in 2004, at the age of seventy-four. This award was renamed in his honor in 2005.
Winner: Michael Walsh, The Dirt Riddles ( University of Arkansas Press )
Finalists for the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry
Paul Legault, The Madeleine Poems ( Omnidawn )
Eric Leigh, Harm's Way ( University of Arkansas Press )
The Audre Lorde Award honors the American poet, essayist, librarian, and teacher. Lorde ( 1934-1992 ) was nominated for the National Book Award for From a Land Where Other People Live and was the poet laureate of New York State in 1991. She received the Publishing Triangle's Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement shortly before her death. Among her other sixteen books are Zami ( 1982 ) and A Burst of Light ( 1989 ) .
Winner: Jen Currin, The Inquisition Yours ( Coach House Books )
Finalists for the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
Elizabeth J. Colen, Money for Sunsets ( Steel Toe Books )
Eleanor Lerman, The Sensual World Re-emerges ( Sarabande Books )
The Publishing Triangle began giving the Shilts-Grahn awards for nonfiction in 1997. Each winner receives $1000. Michelle Kristel, executive director of In the Life Media, and Charles Rice-Gonzalez, one of this year's judges, presented these prizes.
The Judy Grahn Award honors the American writer, cultural theorist and activist ( b. 1940 ) best known for The Common Woman ( 1969 ) and Another Mother Tongue ( rev. ed., 1984 ) . It recognizes the best nonfiction book of the year affecting lesbian lives—the book may be by a lesbian, for example, about a lesbian or lesbian culture, or both.
Winner: Barbara Hammer, Hammer! ( The Feminist Press )
Finalists for the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings ( Harper )
Emma Donoghue, Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature ( Alfred A. Knopf )
The Randy Shilts Award honors the journalist whose groundbreaking work on the AIDS epidemic for the San Francisco Chronicle made him a hero to many in the community. Shilts ( 1951—1994 ) was the author of The Mayor of Castro Street, And the Band Played On, and Conduct Unbecoming.
Winner: Justin Spring, Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward ( Farrar Straus Giroux )
Finalists for the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction
R. Tripp Evans, Grant Wood ( Alfred A. Knopf )
Wendy Moffat, A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster ( Farrar Straus Giroux )
Kristel and Rice-Gonzalez also presented a third award to recognize another outstanding work of nonfiction, Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, an anthology edited by Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman and published by Seal Press. The transpeople, genderqueers and sex/gender radicals who have collectively created this book present the readers with thought-provoking material that confronts gender issues in a vibrant, mind-expanding way. As a result, we are urged to challenge the status quo of seeing gender in binary ways. The anthology celebrates gender-nonconforming people in all their beauty, complexity, and humanity. In honor of these achievements, The Judges' Special Award in Nonfiction was presented to Gender Outlaws; co-editor Kate Bornstein accepted the award, which carries a cash prize of $500.
The Publishing Triangle's newest literary award, the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, was first presented in 2006. This prize, which highlights the Publishing Triangle's ongoing commitment to emerging lesbian and gay talent, is named in honor of the esteemed novelist and man of letters Edmund White—who won the very first Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1989. Martin Hyatt, a past winner of this prize, presented the award, which carries an honorarium of $1000.
Winner: Katherine Beutner, Alcestis ( Soho Press )
Finalists for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction
Michael Alenyikov, Ivan and Misha ( Triquarterly/Northwestern University Press )
Catherine Kirkwood, Cut Away ( Arktoi Books )
In addition, the Publishing Triangle presented its special Leadership Award to The Gay & Lesbian Review/Worldwide. Created in 2002, this award recognizes contributions to lesbian and gay literature by those who are not primarily writers—editors, agents, librarians, and, as in this case, institutions. For seventeen years The Gay & Lesbian Reviewhas provided a forum for enlightened discussion of issues and ideas of importance to lesbians and gay men. Founded as The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review in 1994, this journal for the literate non-specialist consistently offers the best writing and thinking our culture has to offer. With its thematically organized issues and high production values, the magazine provides its LGBT readers with a lively tour through the world of letters six times a year. The Gay & Lesbian Review is a major force in current gay and lesbian intellectual life. Author and scholar Allen Ellenzweig presented this award to Richard Schneider Jr., editor-in-chief and founder of the review.
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The Ferro-Grumley Award for lesbian and gay fiction was established in 1988 to recognize, promote excellence in, and give greater access to fiction writing from lesbian and gay points of view. The award, which has widened to embrace bisexuals and the transgendered, honors the memory of authors Robert Ferro ( The Blue Star, Second Son ) and Michael Grumley ( Life Drawing ) , life partners who died that year of AIDS, within weeks of each other. The winner receives an honorarium of $500. Judges are selected from throughout the U.S. and Canada, from the arts, media, publishing, bookselling, and related fields. The award was presented by Stephen Greco, head of the Ferro-Grumley Literary Awards, and Sarah Van Arsdale, a longtime board member.
Winner: Michael Sledge, The More I Owe You ( Counterpoint Press )
Finalists for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction
Daniel Black, Perfect Peace ( St. Martin's Press )
Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Big Bang Symphony ( University of Wisconsin Press )
Daniel Allen Cox, Krakow Melt ( Arsenal Pulp Press )
David McConnell, The Silver Hearted ( Alyson Books )
Eileen Myles, Inferno ( OR Books )
