17th Annual Triangle Award Finalists
Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction |
Finalists
Alice
Walker: A Life
The Lavender Scare:
Name
All the Animals
The School Among the Ruins
Stonewall: The Riots
Strangers:
Venus Examines Her Breast
Warrior
Poet: A Life of Audre Lorde
Year of the Snake
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The long-awaited first biography of the author of The
Cancer Journals, an American icon of womanhood, poetry, African American
arts, and survival. DURING HER LIFETIME, Audre Lorde (1934-1992) created a
mythic identity for herself that retains its vitality to this day. Alexis
De Veaux demystifies Lorde's iconic status, charting her childhood in
Harlem in the conservative household of Caribbean-immigrant parents; her
early marriage to a white, gay man with whom she had two children; her
emergence as an outspoken black feminist lesbian poet; and her
canonization as a seminal poet of American literature.
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A luminous, poignant true story, Alison Smith's stunning first book, Name All the Animals, is an unparalleled account of grief and secret love: the tale of a family clinging to the memory of a lost child, and a young woman struggling to define herself in the wake of his loss. As children, siblings Alison and Roy Smith were so close that their mother called them by one name: Alroy. But on a cool summer morning when Alison was fifteen, she woke to learn that Roy, eighteen, was dead. This is Smith's extraordinary account of the impact of that loss -- on herself, on her parents, and on a deeply religious community. At home, Alison and her parents sleepwalk in shifts. Alison hoards food for her lost brother, hides in the backyard fort they built together, and waits for him to return. During the day, she breaks every rule at Our Lady of Mercy School for Girls, where the baffled but loving nuns offer prayer, Shakespeare, and a job running the switchboard. In the end, Alison finds her own way to survive: a startling and taboo first love that helps her discover a world beyond the death of her brother. |
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Born to a sharecropping family in Georgia, Alice Walker thrived in the rich culture of what she called the "agrarian peasantry" to become one of our most important and popular writers. Evelyn C. White charts Walker's childhood, marked by an incident at eight that left her blinded in her right eye and disfigured by scar tissue and that prompted her, out of a sense of "ugliness," to probe human suffering through her poems and stories. We learn of her activism in the 1960s freedom movement and her leadership of the debate on black women's art, politics, and sexuality. The Color Purple garnered Walker the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction — the first awarded to a black woman writer. Drawing on papers, letters, journals, and extensive interviews with Walker, her family, friends, and colleagues, and with leading American cultural figures including Gloria Steinem, Quincy Jones, and Oprah Winfrey, White assesses one of the most influential writers of our time.
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Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction |
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Review: He ends appropriately with the emergence of the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activist Alliance, as well as the first gay pride parade, held in June 1970. While it may distract readers interested only in the story of gay liberation, Carter's logistical history of what gay author Edmund White called 'our Bastille Day' will become a permanent addition to the great histories of the civil rights era. (June)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information, Inc.) |
The McCarthy era is generally considered the worst period of political repression in recent American history. But while the famous question, "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" resonated in the halls of Congress, security officials were posing another question at least as frequently, if more discreetly: "Information has come to the attention of the Civil Service Commission that you are a homosexual. What comment do you care to make?" Historian David K. Johnson here relates the frightening, untold story of how, during the Cold War, homosexuals were considered as dangerous a threat to national security as Communists. Charges that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were havens for homosexuals proved a potent political weapon, sparking a "Lavender Scare" more vehement and long-lasting than McCarthy's Red Scare. Relying on newly declassified documents, years of research in the records of the National Archives and the FBI, and interviews with former civil servants, Johnson recreates the vibrant gay subculture that flourished in New Deal-era Washington and takes us inside the security interrogation rooms where thousands of Americans were questioned about their sex lives. The homosexual purges ended promising careers, ruined lives, and pushed many to suicide. But, as Johnson also shows, the purges brought victims together to protest their treatment, helping launch a new civil rights struggle. |
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The nineteenth century was a golden age for those people known variously as sodomites, Uranians, monosexuals, and homosexuals. Long before Stonewall and Gay Pride, there was such a thing as gay culture, and it was recognized throughout Europe and America. Graham Robb, brilliant biographer of Balzac, Hugo, and Rimbaud, examines how homosexuals were treated by society and finds a tale of surprising tolerance. He describes the lives of gay men and women: how they discovered their sexuality and accepted or disguised it; how they came out; how they made contact with like-minded people. He also includes a fascinating investigation of the encrypted homosexuality of such famous nineteenth-century sleuths as Edgar Allan Poe's Auguste Dupin and Sherlock Holmes himself (with glances forward in time to Batman and J. Edgar Hoover). Finally, Strangers addresses crucial questions of gay culture, including the riddle of its relationship to religion: Why were homosexuals created with feelings that the Creator supposedly condemns? Review: A rich and satisfying narrative...Robb is an ideal guide to the period—unfailingly intelligent, compassionate and discreetly witty. (Daily Telegraph [London]) Review: "In Strangers, [Graham Robb] has produced a brilliant work of social archaeology." Adam Goodheart, The New York Times Book Review |
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Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry |
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IN THIS NEW COLLECTION Adrienne Rich confronts dislocations and upheavals in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The title poem, in a young schoolteacher's voice, evokes the lessons that children ("Not of course here") learn amid violence and hatred, "when the whole town flinches/blood on the undersole thickening to glass." "Usonian Journals 2000" intercuts faces and conversations, building to a dystopic/utopic vision. Throughout these fierce and musical poems, Rich traces the imprint of a public crisis on individual experience: personal lives bent by collective realities, language itself held to account. |
In her second collection of poems, Lee Ann Roripaugh probes themes of mixed-race female identities, evoking the molting processes of snakes and insects who shed their skins and shellsas an ongoing metaphor for transformation of self. Intertwining contemporary renditions of traditional Japanese myths and fairy tales with poems that explore the landscape of childhood and early adolescence, she blurs the boundaries between myth and memory, between real and imagined selves. This collection explores cultural, psychological, and physical liminalities and exposes the diasporic arc cast by first-generation Asian mothers and their second-generation daughters, revealing a desire for metamorphosis of self through time, geography, culture, and myth. |
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Ferro-Grumley Award for Gay Fiction |
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Belmondo Style by Adam Berlin Jared Chiziver is a single father and professional pick-pocket, devotee of Jean-Paul Belmondo and foreign films, and a suave ladies' man. His son Ben is sixteen, a bookish semi-introvert, a star on his school's track team, college bound and gay. Their unusual but quiet and affectionate life in New York City's Greenwich Village is ripped asunder by two singular events. First, Jared finally meets 'the one, ' Anna, a photographer of criminals and death scenes - a woman he finds endless engaging. Second, in response to a brutal attack upon his son Ben, Jared breaks his own cardinal rule and commits the big crime, the one that draws the unflinching attention of the police. The only response possible to these events is to leave New York one step ahead of the police and embark upon a journey of both escape and discovery that will irrevocably change their lives. Told from the point of view of the too-wise and too-adult Ben, "Belmondo Style is an unforgettable tale which movingly explores the bonds between an unusual father and a remarkable son. Reviews:
About the Author:
Van Allen's Ecstasy
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