Publishing Triangle Awards
by Kevin Howell -- Publishers Weekly, 5/6/2008 8:27:00 AM
At New York City’s New School, comedian Kate Clinton hosted the 20th annual Publishing Triangle Awards on April 28, honoring the best lesbian and gay fiction, nonfiction, and poetry published in 2007. Three legends in gay publishing were honored with special awards.
Veteran mystery and SF novelist Katherine V. Forrest won the Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award, which comes with a $3,000 prize. While maintaining her writing career, Forrest was senior editor at Naiad Press for a decade and is currently supervising editor at Spinsters Ink. “It’s an extraordinary honor to receive recognition from your peers,” Forrest told the audience. “There are still books to be written, stories to be told and readers waiting to read them. Our glory years are still ahead.”
Carol Seajay and Richard Labonte were honored with the Publishing Triangle’s Leadership Award both their individual achievements and for their work publishing the e-newsletter Books to Watch Out For. Seajay co-founded Old Wives Tales Bookstore in San Francisco in 1976, the same year she began publishing The Feminist Bookstore News, which ran until 2000. Labonte worked with A Different Light Bookstore for 20 years and was a columnist for The Feminist Bookstore News for eight years. He has been the editor of the Best Gay Erotica series since 1997.
Awards in the competitive categories went to a mix of veterans and newbies.
The Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry: Steve Fellner’s Blind Date with Cavafy (Marsh Hawk Press) tied with Daniel Hall’s Under Sleep (Univ. of Chicago Press).
The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry: Joan Larkin’s My Body (Hanging Loose Press).
The Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction: Janet Malcolm’s Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (Yale U.P.)
The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction: Michael Rowe’s Other Men’s Sons (Cormorant Books).
The Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction (carries a $1,000 prize) went to Myriam Gurba’s Dahlia Season (Manic D Press).
The Ferro-Grumley Awards for Lesbian and Gay Fiction: Peter Cameron’s Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You (FSG/Frances Foster Books) and Ali Leibegott’s The IHOP Papers (Carroll & Graf).
Even more LGBT awards lie ahead. During BEA, the Lambda Literary Awards (also celebrating their 20th anniversary) will be presented on May 29 at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood. Charles Flowers, the incoming executive director of the Lambda Literary Foundation, has a unique perspective to describe the difference between the two awards programs—he has been co-chair of the Publishing Triangle for several years. “Both fulfill different needs and both came out of different origins,” he explains. “Editors started the Publishing Triangle awards, while Lambda—which is more comprehensive because we cover more categories—presents their awards from booksellers’ perspective.”
The oldest LGBT awards is the Stonewall Book Awards, presented by the ALA, which originated in 1971. The awards, which include a cash stipend, are announced in January and presented at the American Library Association Annual Conference in June. The ALA presents two awards under this umbrella: the Barbara Gittings Literature Award and the Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award.
