Join eight of the best LGBT writers of 2016 on Wednesday, April 26, at 7 PM, at the Bureau of General Services-Queer Division as they read from their work, all of which are finalists for the prestigious Publishing Triangle and Ferro-Grumley awards to be announced on Thursday, April 27, at the Publishing Triangle Awards Ceremony & Reception, at The Auditorium of the New School, 66 West 12th street (between Fifth and Sixth Avenues).

 

Featuring:

Kathy Anderson: Bull and Other Stories (Autumn House Press), Finalist for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction

Lucy Jane Bledsoe: A Thin Bright Line (University of Wisconsin Press), Finalist for The Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction

Elizabeth M. Edman:  Queer Virtue: What LGBTQ People Know About Life and Love and How It Can Revitalize Christianity (Beacon Press), Finalist for the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction

Matthew Griffin: Hide (Bloomsbury USA), Finalist for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction

Alan Lessik: The Troubleseeker (Chelsea Station Editions), Finalist for The Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction

Paul Lisicky, The Narrow Door (Graywolf Press); finalist for the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction

Joe Okonkwo: Jazz Moon (Kensington), Finalist for the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction

Will Schwalbe: Books for Living (Alfred A. Knopf), Finalist for the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction

 

 

Kathy Anderson is the author of Bull and Other Stories (Autumn House Press, 2016), winner of the 2015 Autumn House Press Fiction Prize. In addition to being a finalist for the 2016 Publishing Triangle’s Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, Bull and Other Stories was a finalist for the 2016 Lambda Literary Awards and the 2016 Foreword INDIES Awards and was longlisted for The Story Prize, 2016. She is also a playwright and member of the Dramatists Guild. She lives with her wife in Philadelphia, PA.

 

 

 

 
Lucy Jane Bledsoe‘s new novel, A Thin Bright Line, was just released. She’s the author of a collection of short stories, a collection of narrative nonfiction, and four novels, including The Big Bang Symphony. Her recent short story, “The We of Me,” published in The Rumpus, was chosen by Ploughshares Magazine as the best story published in lit mags that week.

Her fiction has won a Yaddo Fellowship, the 2013 Saturday Evening Post Fiction Award, the Arts & Letters Fiction Prize, the Sherwood Anderson Prize for Fiction, a Pushcart nomination, a California Arts Council Fellowship, an American Library Association Stonewall Award, and two National Science Foundation Artists & Writers Fellowships. Her stories have been translated into Japanese, Spanish, German, Dutch, and Chinese.

Lucy loves teaching workshops, cooking, traveling anywhere, basketball, doing anything outside, and telling stories. She’s traveled to Antarctica three times, as a two-time recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Artists & Writers in Antarctica Fellowship and once as a guest on the Russian ship, the Akademik Sergey Vavilov. She is one of a tiny handful of people who have stayed at all three American stations in Antarctica. She has also stayed in a number of field camps, both on the coast and in the Transantarctic mountains, where scientists are studying penguins, climate change, and the Big Bang.

 

 

 

 
Liz Edman is an Episcopal priest and political strategist.  She is the author of Queer Virtue: What LGBTQ People Know About Life and Love and How It Can Revitalize Christianity (Beacon Press, 2016).  Liz has lived and worked on the front lines of the most salient contemporary issues where religion meets sexuality, serving as an inner city hospital chaplain to people with HIV/AIDS from 1989 to 1995 and helping craft political and communications strategies for marriage equality efforts.  In 2017, she partnered with Parity to create Glitter+Ash Wednesday, a project to increase the visibility of progressive, queer-positive Christians and to explore Christian liturgical tradition through a queer lens.   She lives in New York.

 

 

 

 
Matthew Griffin is a graduate of Wake Forest University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has taught writing at the University of Iowa and University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and he worked for several years as Assistant to the Director of Highlander Research and Education Center, a renowned hub of grassroots organizing for social justice throughout the South and Appalachia. His first novel Hide was the winner of the 2017 Crook’s Corner Book Prize, a Stonewall Honor Book, and longlisted for the PEN/Bingham Prize for debut fiction. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Granta, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. He was born and raised in North Carolina and now lives with his husband and too many pets in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he teaches at Tulane University.

 

 

 

 
Alan Lessik is a novelist and writer, zen practitioner, amateur figure skater, and LGBT activist, non-profit leader and world traveler. His debut novel, The Troubleseeker, was published by Chelsea Station Editions in 2016. He has had non-fiction articles and commentaries published in the Advocate, San Francisco Bay Guardian, andFrontiers as well as recorded as part of KQED Radio Perspectives. He was the co-founder of Out & Equal, the Deputy Director of the AIDS Research Institute at UCSF and Treasurer of the Federation of Gay Games. Currently he is the Executive Director of Civicorps. Alan lives in San Francisco.

 

 

 

 
Paul Lisicky is the author of five books: The Narrow Door (a New York Times Editors’ Choice), Unbuilt Projects, The Burning House, Famous Builder, and Lawnboy. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, Conjunctions, Fence, The New York Times, The Offing, Ploughshares, Tin House, and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, among others. He is an associate professor in the MFA Program at Rutgers University-Camden and lives in Brooklyn.
 
 

 

 
Joe Okonkwo is a Pushcart Prize nominee who has had stories published in a variety of print and online venues including Promethean, Penumbra Literary Magazine, Chelsea Station, Shotgun Honey, and Best Gay Stories 2015. In addition to his writing career, he has worked in theater as an actor, stage manager, director, playwright and youth theatre instructor. He earned an MFA in Creative Writing from City College of New York. Jazz Moon is his debut novel.
 
 

 

 
Will Schwalbe has worked in publishing (now with Macmillan); digital media, as the founder and CEO of Cookstr.com; and as a journalist, writing for various publications, including The New York Times and the South China Morning Post. He is the author of the New York Times best seller The End of Your Life Book Club and coauthor, with David Shipley, of Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better. His most recent book, Books for Living, is a memoir about the books that found him when he needed them most.