The Publishing Triangle has announced the finalists for the 2026 Publishing Triangle Awards, honoring the best LGBTQ+ books published in 2025.

Winners in ten competitive categories will be announced Thursday, April 16, 2026 at 6:30 PM during an in-person ceremony at The New School (66 West 12th Street, New York City). The ceremony will be hosted by poet and activist Emanuel Xavier, livestreamed online, and followed by a reception.

The awards ceremony and reception are free and open to the public.

RSVP here:
https://event.newschool.edu/the2026publishingtriangleawards

Support This Year’s Finalists
Browse and purchase the 2026 Publishing Triangle Awards finalists on Bookshop:
👉 https://bookshop.org/lists/the-38th-annual-publishing-triangle-awards?page=1

Purchases help support independent bookstores and The Publishing Triangle.

During the ceremony, The Publishing Triangle will also remember several influential figures in LGBTQ+ publishing who passed away over the past year, including poet Jubi Arriola-Headley, writer and editor Victoria Brownworth, pioneering queer publisher Don Weise, and 1989 Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award recipient Edmund White.

Special Awards

Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award

Recipient: Chrystos

Chrystos is the 2026 recipient of the Publishing Triangle’s Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, honoring a lifetime of work and commitment to fostering LGBTQ+ culture. The award includes a $3,000 prize, one of the largest cash prizes in LGBTQ+ letters.

A two-spirit writer, teacher, artist, lecturer, and activist, Chrystos’s work explores Native American civil rights, social justice, and feminism. Their many honors include a National Endowment for the Arts grant, the Sappho Award of Distinction from the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund grant, and the Audre Lorde International Poetry Competition.

Chrystos’s writings address how colonialism and racism affect the lives of women, lesbians, and Indigenous peoples. They have illustrated many of their book covers and often worked with Canadian publishers in response to censorship and lack of support from American publishers earlier in their career.

Chrystos becomes the 38th recipient of this prestigious award, first presented in 1989 to Edmund White.

Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award

Recipient: Mariah Rigg

Mariah Rigg is the recipient of the Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award, presented to an LGBTQ+ writer who has published at least one book but not more than two.

Rigg is the author of the short story collection Extinction Capital of the World (Ecco, 2025), winner of the 2026 Asian Pacific American Award for Literature and named a best book of the year by Esquire, Electric Literature, Debutiful, and Chicago Review of Books. Her hybrid creative nonfiction chapbook All Hat, No Cattle was published by Bull City Press in 2023.

The award includes a $1,500 prize, funded by Teresa DeCrescenzo, the widow of Betty Berzon.

Publishing Triangle Torchbearer Award

Recipient: The Other Side of Silence (TOSOS)

The Torchbearer Award recognizes organizations or individuals who support and promote LGBTQ+ literature.

Founded in 1974, The Other Side of Silence (TOSOS) is New York City’s first professional gay theater company and today the city’s oldest LGBTQ+ theater company. In addition to producing full-length plays, TOSOS curates the Doric Wilson Playwrights Project, a free play-reading series that provides emerging queer playwrights opportunities to share new work while reconnecting audiences with important works from the LGBTQ+ theatrical canon.

The award includes a $1,000 prize, funded by Rob Byrnes.

Michele Karlsberg Leadership Award

Recipient: Amy Scholder

The Michele Karlsberg Leadership Award recognizes individuals whose work has significantly advanced LGBTQ+ literature.

Amy Scholder is a literary editor, publisher, and documentary filmmaker known for championing marginalized and LGBTQ+ writers, artists, and activists. Her authors include Kathy Acker, Justin Vivian Bond, Ana Castillo, Andrea Dworkin, Karen Finley, Barbara Hammer, Gary Indiana, Elfriede Jelinek, June Jordan, Kate Millett, Joni Mitchell, Paul Preciado, Sapphire, Pamela Sneed, and David Wojnarowicz.

Scholder has served as editorial director at The Feminist Press, Verso, Seven Stories Press, and HIGH RISK Books/Serpent’s Tail, and currently serves as editor-at-large at City Lights Books.

The award is funded with the support of Michele Karlsberg.

Competitive Award Finalists

Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ+ Fiction

  • A/S/L — Jeanne Thornton (Soho Press)

  • Are You Happy?: Stories — Lori Ostlund (Astra House)

  • Drought — Scott Alexander Hess (Rebel Satori Press)

  • I Am You — Victoria Redel (SJP Lit)

  • The South — Tash Aw (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction

  • Everything Is Fine Here — Iryn Tushabe (House of Anansi Press)

  • Good Girl — Aria Aber (Hogarth)

  • Lonely Crowds — Stephanie Wambugu (Little, Brown and Company)

  • To the Moon and Back — Eliana Ramage (Simon & Schuster / Avid Reader Press)

  • Woodworking — Emily St. James (Zando – Crooked Media Reads)

Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction

  • All the Parts We Exile — Roza Nozari (Knopf Canada)

  • Beyond the Lesbian Vampire — Sam Tabet (University of Wales Press)

  • Milena and Margarete: A Love Story in Ravensbrück — Gwen Strauss (St. Martin’s Press)

  • No Offense: A Memoir in Essays — Jackie Domenus (ELJ Editions)

  • Worthy of the Event: An Essay — Vivian Blaxell (LittlePuss Press)

Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction

  • American Scare — Robert W. Fieseler (Dutton)

  • Baldwin: A Love Story — Nicholas Boggs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

  • Don Bachardy: An Artist’s Life — Michael Schreiber (Citadel Press)

  • The Einstein of Sex — Daniel Brook (W. W. Norton & Company)

  • The Intermediaries — Brandy Schillace (W. W. Norton & Company)

Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry

  • The Boy Kingdom / El reino de los varones — Achy Obejas (Beacon Press)

  • Essential Poems by Pat Parker — edited by SaraEllen Strongman (Sinister Wisdom)

  • Let the Moon Wobble — Ally Ang (Alice James Books)

  • Lonely Women Make Good Lovers — Keetje Kuipers (BOA Editions)

  • SOFAR — Elizabeth Bradfield (Persea Books)

Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry

  • Brotherful — Bryan Borland (Sibling Rivalry Press)

  • Building the Perfect Animal: New and Selected Poems — C. Dale Young (Four Way Books)

  • I Do Know Some Things — Richard Siken (Copper Canyon Press)

  • Seabeast — Rajiv Mohabir (Four Way Books)

  • Willow Hammer — Patrick Donnelly (Four Way Books)

Leslie Feinberg Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature

  • Gendertrash from Hell — edited by Mirha Soleil-Ross (LittlePuss Press)

  • Local Woman — Jzl Jmz (Nightboat Books)

  • Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson — Tourmaline (Tiny Reparations Books)

  • they/she/he: ritual to forget your (un)becoming — dezireé a. brown (Host Publications)

  • Uncanny Valley Girls — Zefyr Lisowski (Harper Perennial)

Joseph Hansen Award for LGBTQ+ Crime Writing

  • Crime Ink: Iconic — edited by John Copenhaver and Salem West (Bywater Books)

  • Mirage City — Lev AC Rosen (Minotaur Books)

  • A Murderous Business — Cathy Pegau (Minotaur Books)

  • The Smallest Day — J. M. Redmann (Bold Strokes Books)

  • The Tiger and the Cosmonaut — Eddy Boudel Tan (Viking Canada)

Jacqueline Woodson Award for LGBTQ+ Young Adult and Children’s Literature

  • Generation Queer — Kimm Topping (Lee & Low Books)

  • Planeta — Ana Oncina (TOKYOPOP)

  • Star Fruit — Kamryn Kingsberry (IKB Press)

  • Titan of the Stars — E. K. Johnston (Tundra Books)

  • We Can Never Leave — H. E. Edgmon (Wednesday Books)

Amber Hollibaugh Award for LGBTQ+ Social Justice Writing

  • Jesusland — Joelle Kidd (ECW Press)

  • Radical Unlearning — Lewis Raven Wallace (Beacon Press)

  • The Rainbow Ain’t Never Been Enuf — Kaila Adia Story (Beacon Press)

  • Semi Well-Adjusted Despite Literally Everything — Alyson Stoner (St. Martin’s Press)

  • What Is Queer Food? — John Birdsall (W. W. Norton & Company)

 

Explore the Finalists on Bookshop
You can view and purchase many of this year’s finalists here:
👉 https://bookshop.org/lists/the-38th-annual-publishing-triangle-awards?page=1

About the Publishing Triangle

Founded in 1988, the Publishing Triangle works to support LGBTQ+ people in the publishing industry and to promote the publication of books by LGBTQ+ authors and about LGBTQ+ lives.

The organization presents the Publishing Triangle Awards, the OUTspoken LGBTQ+ Reading Series, and a variety of programs that celebrate and amplify LGBTQ+ literature.