The winners of the 36th annual Triangle Awards, which honor the year’s best LGBTQ fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and trans literature published in 2023, were announced at a celebration held at the New School in New York City on April 17. The winners in the nine competitive categories include:

  • The Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ+ Fiction (administered in conjunction with the Ferro-Grumley Foundation) was awarded to Pomegranate, by Helen Elaine Lee (Atria Books).
  • The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction was awarded to: Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco's Tenderloin, by Joseph Plaster (Duke University Press).
  • The Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction went to And Then He Sang a Lullaby, by Ani Kayode Somtochukwu (Grove Atlantic).
  • The Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction was awarded to Suffering Sappho!: Lesbian Camp in American Popular Culture, by Barbara Jane Brickman (Rutgers University Press).
  • The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry was awarded to Have You Been Long Enough At Table by Leslie Sainz (Tin House).
  • The Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry went to Trace Evidence by Charif Shanaha (Tin House).
  • The Leslie Feinberg Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature was awarded to Girlfriends, by Emily Zhou (LittlePuss Press).
  • The Joseph Hansen Award for LGBTQ+ Crime Writing was awarded to: Transitory, by J.M. Redmann (Bold Strokes Books).
  • The Jacqueline Woodson Award for LGBTQ+ Young Adult and Children’s Literature was awarded to Salma Writes a Book, by Danny Ramadan (Annick Press).

In addition to the competitive categories, the organization also honored four previously announced honors:

  • Dorothy Allison was honored with the 2024 Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, which honors the winner’s “lifetime of work and commitment to fostering queer culture.”
  • Emily Drabinski, librarian and current president of the American Library Association, was presented with the 2024 Publishing Triangle Torchbearer Award, which, now in its second year, is given to organizations or individuals who “strive to awaken, encourage, and support a love of reading, or to stimulate an interest in and an appreciation of LGBTQ literature.”
  • Kris Kleindienst, owner of Left Bank Books in St. Louis, Missouri, who was given the Michele Karlsberg Leadership Award. This award honors contributions to LGBTQ literature by those who are not primarily writers, (such as editors, agents, booksellers, and other institutions), with an emphasis on members of the LGBTQ+ writing community.
  • Hilary Zaid was awarded the Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award, the Publishing Triangle’s prize for an LGBTQ+ writer. Zaid is the author of Forget I Told You This: A Novel (Zero Street Books, 2023) and Paper Is White (Bywater Books, 2018).

A complete list of winner and finalists is available on the Publishing Triangle website.