The 25th annual Triangle Awards, honoring the best lesbian and gay fiction, nonfiction, and poetry published in 2012, will be presented on April 25, 2013, at the Tishman Auditorium of the New School (66 West 12th Street in New York City) at 7 p.m. The ceremony is free and open to the public, with a reception to follow.
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.
John D'Emilio is the 2013 recipient of the Publishing Triangle's Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, named in honor of the legendary editor of the 1970s and 1980s. A pioneer in the field of gay and lesbian studies, D'Emilio is the author or editor of more than half a dozen books, including Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority in the United States; Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (with Estelle Freedman); and The World Turned: Essays on Gay History, Politics, and Culture. His Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin won the Publishing Triangle's Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction in 2004. D'Emilio has also won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and received the Brudner Prize from Yale University for lifetime contributions to gay and lesbian studies. A former co-chair of the board of directors of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, he was also the founding director of its Policy Institute. He teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago. 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.
The Publishing Triangle began giving the Shilts-Grahn awards for nonfiction in 1997. Each winner receives $1000. 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, or about a lesbian or lesbian culture, or both.
Finalists for the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
My Almost Certainly Real Imaginary Jesus, by Kelly Barth (Arktoi/Red Hen)
A Queer and Pleasant Danger, by Kate Bornstein (Beacon Press)
Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal, by Jeanette Winterson (Grove Press)
Ms. Bechdel won the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement last year; she is also a past winner of the Judy Grahn Award (for Fun Home, 2007) and the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction (for The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, 2009). Ms. Bornstein was the co-editor of Gender Outlaws, which won a Judges' Special Award in Nonfiction from the Publishing Triangle in 2011. Ms. Winterson won the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction in 1994 for Written on the Body.
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.
Finalists for the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction
Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America, by Christopher Bram (Twelve/Hachette)
Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz, by Cynthia Carr (Bloomsbury)
How to Be Gay, by David M. Halperin (Belknap/Harvard University Press)
Robert Duncan: The Ambassador from Venus, by Lisa Jarnot (University of California Press)
Mr. Bram is a past winner of the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement (in 2003) and has also won the Ferro-Grumley Award, in 2007 for Exiles in America.
The Publishing Triangle established its poetry awards in 2001. Each winner receives $500. 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).
Finalists for the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
The Light That Puts an End to Dreams, by Susan Sherman (Wings Press)
Port of Call, by Davida Singer (Plain View Press)
Song and Spectacle, by Rachel Rose (Harbour Publishing)
Wine for a Shotgun, by Marty McConnell (EM Press)
The Thom Gunn Award honors the British poet Thom Gunn (1929—2004), who lived in San Francisco for much of his life. Gunn was the author of The Man with Night Sweats (1992) and many other acclaimed volumes. In its first four years, this award was known as the Triangle Award for Gay Poetry, and Mr. Gunn himself won the very first such award, in 2001, for his Boss Cupid.
Finalists for the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry
Appetite, by Aaron Smith (University of Pittsburgh Press)
He Do the Gay Man in Different Voices, by Stephen S. Mills (Sibling Rivalry Press)
Looking for the Gulf Motel, by Richard Blanco (University of Pittsburgh Press)
Slow Lightning, by Eduardo C. Corral (Yale University Press)
Mr. Blanco read an original poem at the inauguration of President Barack Obama this January.
The Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, first presented in 2006, is named in honor of Edmund White, the esteemed novelist and man of letters who won the very first Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1989. The Edmund White Award celebrates the future of lesbian and gay literature by awarding a prize to an outstanding first novel or story collection. The winner receives $1000.
Finalists for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction
Broken Like This, by Monica Trasandes (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's)
The Evening Hour, by Carter Sickels (Bloomsbury)
Love, in Theory, by E. J. Levy (University of Georgia Press)
Monstress, by Lysley Tenorio (Ecco/HarperCollins)
Ira Silverberg is the winner of the Publishing Triangle's Leadership Award. Created in 2002, this award recognizes contributions to lesbian and gay literature by those who are not primarily writers—editors, agents, librarians, and institutions. Ira Silverberg is currently the Director of Literature for the National Endowment for the Arts, where (among other things) he oversees the NEA's The Big Read, a nationwide reading initiative. Before coming to the NEA, Silverberg was a literary agent and an editor. As an agent, he has managed a client list of award-winning fiction and nonfiction authors including Adam Haslett, Kathy Acker, Wayne Koestenbaum, David Wojnarowicz, Karen Finley, and Dennis Cooper. As an editor (Silverberg was editor in chief of Grove Press and, before that, U.S. publisher and co-editorial director for Serpent's Tail), he published Sapphire, Gary Indiana, Neil Bartlett, and Herve Guibert, among others. He also handled public relations for William S. Burroughs for many years. Throughout his career, Silverberg has been a tireless advocate for LGBT books and transgressive authors, making him a worthy honoree for this Leadership Award.
The Ferro-Grumley Awards for lesbian and gay fiction were established in 1988 to recognize, promote excellence in, and give greater access to fiction writing from lesbian and gay points of view. These awards honor the memory of authors Robert Ferro (The Blue Star, Second Son, etc.) and Michael Grumley (Life Drawing, etc.), life partners who both died that year of AIDS. Each year a specially constituted panel of judges bestows one award (from 1988 through 2008, two awards were given each year, one for gay fiction and one for lesbian fiction). Judges are selected from throughout the U.S. and Canada, from the arts, media, publishing, bookselling, and related fields. The winner receives $500.
Finalists for The Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction
An Arab Melancholia, by Abdelleh TaÃŻa (Semiotext[e])
By Blood, by Ellen Ullman (Farrar Straus Giroux)
A Horse Named Sorrow, by Trebor Healey (University of Wisconsin Press)
King of Angels, by Perry Brass (Belhue Press)
The Lava in My Bones, by Barry Webster (Arsenal Pulp Press)
Sea Change, by Ken Anderson (Starbooks Press)
Mr. Healey is a past winner of this award—his Through It Came Bright Colors won in 2004.
