It's 2022 and the 34th Annual Lambda Literary Awards are upon us! Also known as "Lammy" finalists, these titles "were selected by a panel of over 60 literary professionals from more than 2,300 book submissions—the highest in Lammy Award history." This year, there will be a virtual award ceremony on June 11th.
The organization's mission is to nurture and advocate for LGBTQ writers, "elevating the impact of their words to create community, preserve our legacies, and affirm the value of our stories and our lives." Read more about Lambda Literary on their Mission & History web page.
Previous winners include Samantha Irby's Wow, No Thank You and Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House.
For the complete list, which includes titles ICPL does not own, visit the Lambda Literary Awards Finalists page.
Borealis
Sabatini Sloan, Aisha, author.
814.6 /Sabatini Sloan
"In Borealis, Aisha Sabatini Sloan writes about a solitary summer visit to Alaska, observing glaciers, shorelines, mountains, bald eagles, and herself. As she studies her surroundings, the myth of Alaska-excitement, exploration, possibility-is complicated by boredom and isolation, and her attempts to set down place in writing are suffused with nostalgia and anxiety. The first title commissioned for the Spatial Species series, Borealis is a shapeshifting logbook of Sabatini Sloan's experiences as a queer woman contemplating her Blackness in the wilderness and in the mysteries of art-making. The Spatial Species series, edited by Youmna Chlala and Ken Chen, investigates the ways we activate space through language. In the tradition of Georges Perec's An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, Spatial Species titles are pocket-sized editions, each keenly focused on place. Instead of tourist spots and public squares, we encounter unmarked, noncanonical spaces: edges, alleyways, diasporic traces. Such intimate journeying requires experiments in language and genre, moving travelogue, fiction, or memoir into something closer to eating, drinking, and dreaming"--
Dark tourist : essays
Sirisena, Hasanthika, author.
814.6 /Sirisena
"Blends reportage, cultural criticism, and memoir to excavate sites of personal, cultural, and political trauma and find wider truths about sexuality, art, language, and identity"--
Finalist in Bisexual Nonfiction
- Melody
Greedy : notes from a bisexual who wants too much
Winston, Jen, author.
306.766 /Winston
"Jen's provocative, laugh-out-loud debut takes us inside her journey of self-discovery, leading us through stories of a childhood "girl crush," an onerous quest to have a threesome, and an enduring fear of being bad at sex. Greedy follows Jen's attempts to make sense of herself as she explores the role of the male gaze, what it means to be "queer enough," and how to overcome bi stereotypes when you're the posterchild for all of them: greedy, slutty, and constantly confused. With her clever voice and clear-eyed insight, Jen draws on personal experiences with sexism and biphobia to understand how we all can and must do better. She sheds light on the reasons women, queer people, and other marginalized groups tend to make ourselves smaller, provoking the question: What would happen if we suddenly stopped? Greedy shows us that being bisexual is about so much more than who you're sleeping with--it's about finding stability in a state of flux and defining yourself on your own terms. This book inspires us to rethink the world as we know it, reminding us that Greedy was a superpower all along."--Amazon.
Finalist in Bisexual Nonfiction
- Melody
The kissing bug : a true story of a family, an insect, and a nation's neglect of a deadly disease
Hernández, Daisy, author.
616.9363 /Hernandez
"Growing up in a New Jersey factory town in the 1980s, Daisy Hernández believed that her aunt had become deathly ill from eating an apple. No one in her family, in either the United States or Colombia, spoke of infectious diseases, and even into her thirties, she only knew that her aunt had died of a rare illness called Chagas. But as Hernández dug deeper, she discovered that Chagas--or the kissing bug disease--is more prevalent in the United States than the Zika virus. Today, more than three hundred thousand Americans have Chagas. Why do some infectious diseases make headlines and others fall by the wayside? After her aunt's death, Hernández begins searching for answers about who our nation chooses to take care of and who we ignore. Crisscrossing the country, she interviews patients, epidemiologists, and even veterinarians with the Department of Defense. She learns that outside of Latin America, the United States is the only country with the native insects--the "kissing bugs"--that carry the Chagas parasite. She spends a night in southwest Texas hunting the dreaded bug with university researchers. She also gets to know patients, like a mother whose premature baby was born infected with the parasite, his heart already damaged. And she meets one cardiologist battling the disease in Los Angeles County with local volunteers. The Kissing Bug tells the story of how poverty, racism, and public policies have conspired to keep this disease hidden--and how the disease intersects with Hernández's own identity as a niece, sister, and daughter; a queer woman; a writer and researcher; and a citizen of a country that is only beginning to address the harms caused by Chagas, and the dangers it poses. A riveting and nuanced investigation into racial politics and for-profit healthcare in the United States, The Kissing Bug reveals the intimate history of a marginalized disease and connects us to the lives at the center of it all"--
Finalist in Bisexual Nonfiction
- Melody
Dear Senthuran : a Black spirit memoir
Emezi, Akwaeke, author.
BIOGRAPHY Emezi, Akwaeke
"A full-throated and provocative memoir in letters from the New York Times-bestselling author of The Death of Vivek Oji, "a dazzling literary talent whose works cut to the quick of the spiritual self" (Esquire). "I want to write as if I am free," Akwaeke Emezi declares in the opening of this utterly original spiritual and creative memoir. In the novels Freshwater and The Death of Vivek Oji, Emezi introduced the landscape of Nigerian childhood through the medium of fiction. Now, the award-winning author lifts the veil of invention to reveal the harrowing yet inspiring truths of their personal, spiritual, and artistic journey--from the social constraints of childhood in Aba, Nigeria, through a lifetime of discoveries involving sexuality, storytelling, and self, to their determination to carve their way through the thorny labyrinth of the publishing world. Interweaving candid, intimate letters to friends, lovers, and family, Emezi reveals the raw pain of their journey as a spirit in the human world, the perils of all-consuming love and intimacy, and the hard-earned reward of achieving both literary recognition and a peaceful, joyous home. Electrifying and radically honest, animated by the same voracious intelligence that distinguishes their fiction, Dear Senthuran is a revelatory account of what it means to embody multiple spirits, to fight for survival, and to bend the world to one's will"--
Finalist in LGBTQ Nonfiction
- Melody
Girlhood : essays
Febos, Melissa, author.
155.333 /Febos
"When her body began to change at eleven years old, Febos understood immediately that her meaning to other people had changed with it. By her teens, she defined herself based on these perceptions and by the romantic relationships she threw herself into headlong. Over time, Febos increasingly questioned the stories she'd been told about herself and the habits and defenses she'd developed over years of trying to meet others' expectations ... Blending investigative reporting, memoir, and scholarship, Febos charts how she and others like her have reimagined relationships and made room for the anger, grief, power, and pleasure women have long been taught to deny"--Publisher marketing.
Finalist in LGBTQ Nonfiction
- Melody
Let the record show : a political history of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993
Schulman, Sarah, 1958- author.
362.19697 /Schulman
"Based on more than two hundred interviews with ACT UP members and rich with lessons for today's activists, Let the Record Show is a revelatory exploration--and long-overdue reassessment--of the coalition's inner workings, conflicts, achievements, and ultimate fracture. Schulman, one of the most revered queer writers and thinkers of her generation, explores the how and the why, examining, with her characteristic rigor and bite, how a group of desperate outcasts changed America forever, and in the process created a livable future for generations of people across the world."--
Finalist in LGBTQ Nonfiction
- Melody
Northern light : power, land, and the memory of water
Ali, Kazim, 1971- author.
BIOGRAPHY Ali, Kazim
"An examination of the lingering effects of a hydroelectric power station on Pimicikamak sovereign territory in Manitoba, Canada"--
Finalist in LGBTQ Nonfiction
- Melody
The renunciations : poems
Kelly, Donika, author.
811.6 /Kelly
"The Renunciations is a book of resilience, survival, and the journey to radically shift one's sense of self in the face of trauma. Moving between a childhood marked by love and abuse and the breaking marriage of that adult child, Donika Kelly charts memory and the body as landscapes to be traversed and tended. These poems construct life rafts and sanctuaries even in their most devastating confrontations with what a person can bear, with how families harm themselves. With the companionship of "the oracle", an observer of memory who knows how each close call with oblivion ends the act of remembrance becomes curative, and personal mythologies give way to a future defined less by wounds than by possibility.In this gorgeous and heartrending second collection, we find the home one builds inside oneself after reckoning with a legacy of trauma, a home whose construction starts "with a razing.""--Amazon.
Finalist in Lesbian Poetry
- Melody
Besiege me
Wong, Nicholas, 1979- author.
821.92 /Wong
A new collection six years after Nicholas Wong won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, BESIEGE ME opens with a timely mocking tone that confronts the tension between China and Hong Kong. Poems in the book speak queerly of urban existences crushed by political and economic powers --"What cities & bodies deny a sometime-crisis, / not knowing they're a series of which?" Behind the portrayals of the speaker, his parents, his home city, and domestic migrant workers there, the collection boldly outlines the vulnerability of entrapment and its masochistic pleasures. BESIEGE ME seeks for a redefinition of transcultural poetics with its linguistic playfulness. --from Amazon
Finalist in Gay Poetry
- Melody
Gumbo ya ya
Marie, Aurielle, 1994- author.
811.6 /Marie
Gumbo Ya Ya, Aurielle Marie’s stunning debut, is a cauldron of hearty poems exploring race, gender, desire, and violence in the lives of Black gxrls, soaring against the backdrop of a contemporary South. These poems are loud, risky, and unapologetically rooted in the glory of Black gxrlhood. The collection opens with a heartrending indictment of injustice. What follows is a striking reimagination of the world, one where no Black gxrl dies “by the barrel of the law” or “for loving another Black gxrl.” Part familial archival, part map of Black resistance, Gumbo Ya Ya catalogs the wide gamut of Black life at its intersections, with punching cultural commentary and a poetic voice that holds tenderness and sharpness in tandem. It asks us to chew upon both the rich meat and the tough gristle, and in doing so we walk away more whole than we began and thoroughly satisfied.
Finalist in Bisexual Poetry
- Melody
The sunflower cast a spell to save us from the void
Wang, Jackie, author.
811.6 /Wang
"The poems in The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void read like dispatches from the dream world, with Jackie Wang acting as our trusted comrade reporting across time and space. By sharing her personal index of dreams with its scenes of solidarity and resilience, interpersonal conflict and outlaw jouissance, Wang embodies historical trauma and communal memory. Here, the all-too-familiar interplay between crisis and resistance becomes first distorted, then clarified and refreshed. With a light touch and invigorating sense of humor, Wang illustrates the social dimension of dreams and their ability to inform and reshape the dreamer's waking world with renewed energy and insight."--Publisher's description.
Finalist in Bisexual Poetry
- Melody
¡Hola Papi! : how to come out in a Walmart parking lot and other life lessons
Brammer, John Paul, 1991- author.
BIOGRAPHY Brammer, John Paul
The first time someone called Brammer "Papi" was on the gay hookup app Grindr. At first he took this as white-guy speak for "hey, handsome." What started as a racialized moniker given to him on the hookup app soon became the inspiration for his now wildly popular advice column. Here Brammer shares his story of growing up biracial and in the closet in America's heartland, while attempting to answer some of life's toughest questions. This book is for anyone-- gay, straight, and everything in between-- who has ever taken stock of their unique place in the world. -- adapted from jacket
Finalist in Gay Memoir/Biography
- Melody
Never silent : ACT UP and my life in activism
Staley, Peter, author.
362.19697 /Staley
"Never Silent tells previously untold stories of the life of the leading subject of David France's How To Survive A Plague, Peter Staley, including his continuous activism to find treatments and public health interventions.The previously untold stories of the life of the leading subject in David France's How To Survive A Plague, Peter Staley, including his continuing activism In 1987, somebody shoved a flyer into the hand of Peter Staley: massive AIDS demonstration, it announced. After four years on Wall Street as a closeted gay man, Staley was familiar with the homophobia common on trading floors. He also knew that he was not beyond the reach of HIV, having recently been diagnosed with AIDS-Related Complex. A week after the protest, Staley found his way to a packed meeting of the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power--ACT UP--in the West Village. It would prove to be the best decision he ever made. ACT UP would change the course of AIDS, pressuring the National Institutes of Health, the FDA, and three administrations to finally respond with research that ultimately saved millions of lives. Staley, a shrewd strategist with nerves of steel, organized some of the group's most spectacular actions, from shutting down trading on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to putting a giant condom over the house of Senator Jesse Helms. Never Silent is the inside story of what brought Staley to ACT UP and the explosive and sometimes painful years to follow--years filled with triumph, humiliation, joy, loss, and persistence.Never Silent is guaranteed to inspire the activist within all of us. " --
Finalist in Gay Memoir/Biography
- Melody
Punch me up to the gods
Broome, Brian, author.
BIOGRAPHY Broome, Brian
Playful, poignant and wholly original, this coming-of-age memoir about Blackness, masculinity and addiction follows the author, a poet and screenwriter, as he recounts his experiences, revealing a perpetual outsider awkwardly squirming to find his way in. --
Finalist in Gay Memoir/Biography
- Melody
Finalist in Bisexual Nonfiction
- Melody