Now in its 35th year, the Lambda Literary Award is considered one of the most prestigious awards in LGBTQ publishing. This year’s winners were selected by a panel of over 60 judges from the literary world and from more than 1,300 book submissions from over 300 publishers. “Our writers represent our greatest culture creators,” Samiya Bashir, the new Lambda Literary executive director, wrote when announcing the winners.
Bashir continued by explaining in her powerful statement that, in this moment "when our voices and our stories are being weaponized against our very lives across the country, supporting our storytellers—whether their media centers the page, the stage or the survey, is more critical by the day."
Many of the winners are available as audibooks so you can add them to your Library and hear these voices and celebrate these stories that have been artfully and joyfully told.
A staff writer at The New Yorker and winner of the Pulitzer Prize brilliantly explores the role that loss and discovering play in all of our lives, in this part memoir, part guidebook to living in a world that always demands both our gratitude and our grief.
A debut memoir about coming of age as a gay, Latinx man, it opens in the ultimate anti-gay space: Edgar Gomez's uncle's cockfighting ring in Nicaragua, where he was sent at 13-years-old to become a man. Listeners follow Gomez through the queer spaces where he learned to love being gay and Latinx, including Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, a drag queen convention in Los Angeles, and the doctor's office where he was diagnosed a "high-risk homosexual".
Reclaiming her origin story as the queer daughter of a Muslim Nigerian immigrant and a Black American visual artist, the author creates a space for the beauty of Blackness, Islam, disability, and queerness to flourish, emerging from the erasures America imposes to exist proudly and unabashedly as herself.
For fans of Mexican Gothic, from three-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author Gwendolyn Kiste comes a novel inspired by the untold stories of forgotten women in classic literature—from Lucy Westnera, a victim of Stoker’s Dracula, and Bertha Mason, Mr. Rochester’s attic-bound wife in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre—as they band together to combat the toxic men bent on destroying their lives, set against the backdrop of the Summer of Love, Haight-Ashbury, 1967.
With each tale, K-Ming Chang gives us her own take on a surrealism that mixes myth and migration, corporeality and ghostliness, queerness and the quotidian. Stunningly told in her feminist fabulist style, these are uncanny stories peeling back greater questions of power and memory.
Breaking his promise to protect Hussam, with whom he fell in love as they coped with a shared traumatic experience and devastating separation in Syria, Wassim must come to terms with the past as they both realize the secret that haunts them is not the only secret that formed them.
Transferred to a Catholic school, 16-year-old Yami Flores finds it hard to fake being straight when she falls for Bo, the only openly queer girl at school, but refuses to follow her heart until she learns to live her full truth out loud.
Pretending to still be his ex’s current boyfriend in front of his parents, Kian reluctantly winds up being Hudson’s plus-one at a splashy Georgia wedding and the pair find themselves in need of hashing out their true feelings.
From Maulik Pancholy comes a new middle grade novel about a gay Indian American boy who learns the power of using his voice. The voice actor for a hit animated series, 13-year-old Nikhil must find the courage to speak out about what’s right when a group of conservative parents protest his openly gay status.
A destitute maidservant must choose whom to love: her vampire mistress, or the woman trying to save her life in The Wicked and the Willing, a standalone, F/F, steamy historical gothic horror vampire novel with a love triangle, a choice of endings and no cliffhangers.
In Hayley Scrivenor's Dirt Creek, a small-town debut mystery described as The Dry meets Everything I Never Told You, a girl goes missing and a community falls apart and comes together.
The author of the “swoon-worthy debut” (Harper’s Bazaar) The Charm Offensivereturns with a festive romantic comedy about a woman who fakes an engagement with her landlord...only to fall for his sister.
