Two PRH Authors Win at Publishing Triangle Awards
Last week, the 37th Annual Publishing Triangle Awards, which honors the year’s best LGBTQ literature, was held at the New School in Manhattan. Two Penguin Random House authors were among the winners.
Jiaming Tang, author of CINEMA LOVE (Dutton), was awarded both the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ+ Fiction and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction.
- The Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ+ Fiction honors culture-driving fiction from LGBTQ points of view. The award is given for books published in the preceding year. The winner receives a prize of $1000.
- The Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, inaugurated in May 2006, recognizes outstanding first novels or story collections by LGBTQ+ authors published in the preceding year. The award is open to first-book authors of any age whose work contains queer themes. The winner receives a prize of $1000.
Cass Donish, author of YOUR DAZZLING DEATH (Knopf), received the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry.
- The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry, for titles published in the preceding year, honors the American poet, essayist, librarian, and teacher. Starting in 2018, the winner receives a prize of $1000; prior to that, winners received $500.
Photography by Andres Otero
Publishing Triangle Award Winners (pictured from left to right):
Margot Douaihy – Winner of the Joseph Hansen Award for LGBTQ Crime Writing
Blas Falconer – Winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry
Cass Donish – Winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
Rabih Alameddine – Recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement
Jiaming Tang – Winner of the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction
David Groff – Recipient of the Michele Karlsberg Leadership Award
About Jiaming Tang’s CINEMA LOVE:
Spanning three timelines—post-socialist China, 1980s Chinatown, and contemporary New York—CINEMA LOVE is an immigrant story about gay men from rural China, the women who marry them, and the secret theater where their husbands cruised for love. The novel has been praised by The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, authors like Alice Hoffman, Robert Jones, Jr., Jessamine Chan, and many more.
Tang holds an MFA from the University of Alabama and was a Center for Fiction Emerging Writer Fellow. He was inspired to write the novel during a trip to rural China, when he was at a bus stop and saw a man touch another man’s arm. “I recognized, in the man’s gaze, the kind of tenderness seen in long-devoted couples. Also: a powerful and desperate yearning, like hunger during a famine…I was struck that he couldn’t express it openly, in a place that we both called home. The incident left me wondering: what would queer love look like to me if my family hadn’t left China?”
Tang’s editor, Senior Editor Pilar Garcia-Brown, also edited MAGICAL/REALISM (Tiny Reparations Books), a Triangle finalist for the Amber Hollibaugh Award for LGBTQ+ Social Justice Writing.
About Cass Donish’s YOUR DAZZLING DEATH:
Written in the devastating aftermath of a partner’s suicide, this unprecedented collection is a restorative memorial act, an exploration of queer time, and a powerful expression of nonbinary and trans love in the wake of traumatic loss.
In YOUR DAZZLING DEATH, Cass Donish courageously summons the poems to witness their own state of “obliteration,” widowed by suicide and isolated as a global pandemic is unfolding. Elegizing their partner, the poet Kelly Caldwell, they insist that the intimate, ongoing conversation with a beloved mysteriously continues after loss.
Queer poet and writer Cass Donish was born and raised in the Greater Los Angeles Area. They are the author of the poetry collections BEAUTYBERRY and THE YEAR OF THE FEMME, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, as well as the nonfiction chapbook, On the Mezzanine. Their work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, The Gettysburg Review, Guernica, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Poem-a-Day, VICE, and elsewhere. Donish received an MA in cultural geography from the University of Oregon, an MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis, and a PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Missouri. They live in Columbia, Missouri.
From left to right: Emanuel Xavier (Berger), of the Penguin Random House Special Markets team and the Publishing Triangle ceremony host, Roz Parr, Former Marketing Director, Vintage Books, Anchor Books and Everyman’s Library, and Brian Berger.
Read more about The Publishing Triangle Awards here and on Publishers Weekly.
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