2020 Triangle Award Finalists Announced

Mar 16, 2020

The 32nd annual Triangle Awards, which will honor the best LGBTQ fiction, nonfiction, and poetry published in 2019, will be presented on April 30 at the Tishman Auditorium at the New School’s University Center in New York at 7 p.m.

Three of the winners have already been announced. Eileen Myles has been named the 2020 recipient of the Publishing Triangle’s Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, which comes with a $3,000 prize. Oliver Baez Bendorf has been named the 2020 recipient of the Publishing Triangle’s Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award, its prize for an LGBTQ writer who has published at least one book but not more than two, and will receive a prize of $1500 with this award. And the documentary In Her Words: 20th Century Lesbian Fiction is the winner of the Publishing Triangle Leadership Award, which recognizes contributions to LGBTQ literature by those who are not primarily writers, such as editors, agents, librarians, and institutions.This year’s winner, which is the first feature documentary to be honored and examines the history and impact of lesbian fiction from the 1920s through the 1990s, will receive a $500 prize.

In addition, the following finalists have been named:

Finalists for the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction

In the Dream House, by Carmen Maria Machado (Graywolf Press)
Sontag: Her Life and Work, by Benjamin Moser (Ecco)
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, by Saidiya Hartman (W. W. Norton)
We Have Always Been Here, by Samra Habib (Viking / Penguin Canada)

Finalists for the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction

Buying Gay, by David K. Johnson (Columbia University Press)
How We Fight for Our Lives, by Saeed Jones (Simon & Schuster)
The Stonewall Reader, edited by the New York Public Library (Penguin Books)
When Brooklyn Was Queer, by Hugh Ryan (St. Martin’s)

Finalists for the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry

Be Recorder, by Carmen Giménez Smith (Graywolf Press)
Odes to Lithium, by Shira Erlichman (Alice James Books)
Soft Science, by Franny Choi (Alice James Books)
Tonguebreaker, by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Arsenal Pulp Press)

Finalists for the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry

The Book of Daniel, by Aaron Smith (University of Pittsburgh Press)
Company, by Sam Ross (Four Way Books)
Documents, by Jan-Henry Gray (BOA Editions)
Impure Acts, by Angelo Nestore; translated by Lawrence Schimel (Indolent Books)

Finalists for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction

Black Light, by Kimberly King Parsons (Vintage)
In West Mills, by De’Shawn Charles Winslow (Bloomsbury)
Lot, by Bryan Washington (Riverhead)
Shut Up You’re Pretty, by Téa Mutonji (Arsenal Pulp Press)

Finalists for the Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature

Disintegrate/Dissociate, by Arielle Twist (Arsenal Pulp Press)
I Hope We Choose Love, by Kai Cheng Thom (Arsenal Pulp Press)
The Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian), by Hazel Jane Plante (Metonymy Press)
We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, 1961–1991, edited by Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma (Nightboat Books)

Finalists for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction

A Generous Spirit: Selected Work by Beth Brant, edited by Janice Gould (Sinister Wisdom)
Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernardine Evaristo (Black Cat / Grove Atlantic)
Lie with Me, by Philippe Besson; translated by Molly Ringwald (Scribner)
Like Wings, Your Hands, by Elizabeth Earley (Red Hen Press)
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong (Penguin Press)
Red at the Bone, by Jacqueline Woodson (Riverhead)