The Publishing Triangle, the association of LGBTQ+ people in publishing, announced the winners in their nine competitive awards categories during the 36th Annual Publishing Triangle Awards, held at New York City’s The New School on the evening of April 17, 2024. This event, hosted by poet Emanuel Xavier, honored the best LGBTQ+ books published in 2023, and included the new Jacqueline Woodson Award for LGBTQ+ Young Adult and Children’s Literature.

Previously announced honorees in special award categories include:

  • Dorothy Allison, the 2024 recipient of the Publishing Triangle’s Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement.  This award celebrates the recipient’s lifetime of work and commitment to fostering queer culture. The winner receives $3000, one of the largest cash prizes in LGBTQ+ letters.
  • Emily Drabinski, president of the American Library Association, who was presented with the 2024 Publishing Triangle Torchbearer Award. The award, 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 institutions, and is funded with the support of Michele Karlsberg, head of the eponymous marketing and publicity firm with an emphasis on members of the LGBTQ+ writing community.
  • Hilary Zaid, the winner of the Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award, the Publishing Triangle’s prize for an LGBTQ+ writer who has published at least one book but not more than two. She is the author of Forget I Told You This: A Novel (Zero Street Books, 2023) and Paper Is White (Bywater Books, 2018).

Winners in the nine competitive categories follow.

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The Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ+ Fiction, administered in conjunction with the Ferro-Grumley Foundation, was awarded to:

Finalists were:

  • Chain-Gang All-Stars, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Penguin Random House)
  • Dandelion Daughter, by Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay, translated by Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch (Esplanade Books)
  • Girlfriends, by Emily Zhou (LittlePuss Press)
  • Wound, by Oksana Vasyakina, translated by Elina Alter (Catapult Books)

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The Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction was awarded to:

Finalists were:

  • After Sappho, by Selby Wynn Schwartz (Liveright)
  • Churn: A Novel in Stories, by Chloe Chun Seim (Texas Review Press: The University Press of Sam Houston State University)
  • Our Hideous Progeny, by C. E. McGill (HarperCollins)

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The Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction was awarded to:

Finalists were:

  • The Famous Lady Lovers: Black Women and Queer Desire Before Stonewall, by Cookie Woolner (University of North Carolina Press)
  • Hijab Butch Blues,  by Lamya H (The Dial Press)
  • We the Parasites, by A.V. Marraccini (Sublunary Editions)

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The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction was awarded to:

Finalists were:

  • Boyslut: A Memoir and Manifesto, by Zachary Zane (Abrams Image, an imprint of Abrams Books)
  • Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It, by Greg Marshall (Abrams Books)
  • Queer Callings: Untimely Notes on Names and Desires, by Mark D. Jordan (Fordham University Press)

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The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry was awarded to:

Finalists were:

  • Four in Hand by Alicia Mountain (BOA Editions)
  • I Am the Most Dangerous Thing by Candace Williams (Alice James Books)
  • motherworld: a devotional for the alter-life by Destiny Hemphill (Action Books)

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The Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry was awarded to:

Finalists were:

  • Pig by Sam Sax (Scribner)
  • Poem Bitten by a Man by Brian Teare (Nightboat Books)
  • To the Boy Who Was Night by Rigoberto González (Four Way Books)

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The Leslie Feinberg Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature was awarded to:

Finalists were:

  • Adult Human Male, by Oliver Radclyffe (Unbound Edition Press)
  • On Community, by Casey Plett (Biblioasis)
  • Sinister Wisdom 128: Trans/Feminisms, by Talia Bettcher, Marci Blackman,  Claudia Sofia Garriga-Lopez, Cecilia Gentili, Kris Grey, Shereen Imayatulla, Nadine Rodriguez, Cassidy Scanlon, Catalina Schliebener Munoz, Red Washburn, Fitch Wilder, and Sarah Youngblood Gregory (Sinister Wisdom)

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The Joseph Hansen Award for LGBTQ+ Crime Writing was awarded to:

  • Transitory, by J.M. Redmann (Bold Strokes Books)

Finalists were:

  • BeatNikki’s Cafe, by Renee James (Amble Press/Bywater Books)
  • The Lost Americans, by Christopher Bollen (HarperCollins)
  • Remain Silent, by Robyn Gigl (Kensington Publishing Corporation)

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The Jacqueline Woodson Award for LGBTQ+ Young Adult and Children’s Literature was awarded to:

Finalists were:

  • Blackward, by Lawrence Lindell (Drawn & Quarterly)
  • Dragging Mason County, by Curtis Campbell (Annick Press)
  • The Otherwoods, by Justine Pucella Winans (Bloomsbury Children’s Books)