The 16th Annual Publishing Triangle Awards, honoring the best lesbian and gay fiction, nonfiction, and poetry published in 2003, were presented at a ceremony in New York on May 12, sponsored by HX Magazine and HarperCollins.

The winners and finalists in the nonfiction, fiction, and poetry categories are:

The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction
Augusten Burroughs, Dry (St. Martin’s)
WINNER! John D’Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin (Free Press)
Dale Peck, What We Lost (Houghton Mifflin)

The Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
Casey Charles, The Sharon Kowalski Case: Lesbian and Gay Rights on Trial (University Press of Kansas)
WINNER! Lillian Faderman, Naked in the Promised Land (Houghton Mifflin)
Andrew Wilson, Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith (Bloomsbury USA)

The Ferro-Grumley Awards for Fiction: Men
Christopher Bram, Lives of the Circus Animals (William Morrow)
WINNER! Trebor Healey, Through It Came Bright Colors (Harrington Park)
John Rowell, The Music of Your Life (Simon & Schuster)

The Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction: Women
Alison Bechdel, Dykes and Sundry Other Carbon-Based Life-Forms to Watch Out For (Alyson)
Rebecca Brown, The End of Youth (City Lights)
WINNER! Nina Revoyr, Southland (Akashic)

The Publishing Triangle Award for Gay Male Poetry
Patrick Donnelly, The Charge (Ausable Press)
Peter Pereira, Saying the World (Copper Canyon Press)
WINNER! Brian Teare, The Room Where I Was Born (University of Wisconsin Press)

The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry
WINNER! Daphne Gottlieb, Final Girl (Soft Skull Press)
Marilyn Hacker, Desesperanto (W.W. Norton)
Minnie Bruce Pratt, The Dirt She Ate (University of Pittsburgh Press)

The recipient of the 2004 Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement is Lillian Faderman. The award is named in honor of a legendary editor of the 1970s and 1980s. Faderman is the author of several significant works of history, including Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present, Chloe Plus Olivia, To Believe in Women, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, and most recently, a memoir, Naked in the Promised Land (a finalist for the Grahn award). The Bill Whitehead Award is given to a woman in even-numbered years and a man in odd years. Novelist and playwright Sarah Schulman introduced Ms. Faderman.

The winner of The Publishing Triangle Leadership Award is Barbara Gittings, who headed the Gay Task Force of the American Library Association (ALA) from 1971 to 1986 and edited its Gay Bibilography and other gay reading lists. Gittings founded the New York chapter of the Daughters of Bilitis and edited its magazine, The Ladder. She was instrumental in having homosexuality removed from the American Psychiatric Association's list of mental disorders.

The Robert Chesley Foundation, named for the late playwright whose play Jerker was the first play about AIDS to be staged in the United States, has announced the winners of its 2004 award for Lifetime Achievement in Playwriting. This year’s co-winners are Rebecca Ranson (Lifetime Achievement Award) and Jane Shepard. Rebecca Ranson received a BA from the University of Georgia in Radio/TV/Film and an MFA from the University of North Carolina in Playwriting. In 1983, when her friend Warren Johnston was diagnosed with AIDS, the center of her life became gay and lesbian issues and she served as the Artistic Director of Atlanta’s Southeastern Arts Media and Education Project (SAME) for twelve years. When Warren died in April, 1984, she wrote a play, Warren, and her other gay/lesbian plays include Desperadoes: A Trilogy, Secrets, A Glorietta, For Love and For Life, and Lavender Hearts. Author of over thirty plays, many of them dealing with social issues, Ranson is currently conducting more interviews with nurses, doctors, lovers, families and friends based on twenty years of AIDS in San Francisco and Atlanta. Jane Shepard is a three-time recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and in 2003 was honored with the Berilla Kerr Playwrighting Award for her play Strange Grace. A former member of the acclaimed Circle Rep Lab, Jane has gone on to work with The Public, N.Y. Stage & Film, E.S.T., The Women’s Project, New Georges, Six Figures, and The LAB Theatre Company. She began 2004 with a premiere of The Idiot’s Guide to the Brain, an autobiographical comedy on growing up with learning disabilities and a scientist father, at the Vital Theater.

To view a complete list of past Triangle Award winners, visit our awards page. There you will also find information about special privileges that Publishing Triangle members have in nominating books and authors for these literary awards.

This page was last updated on May 5, 2004.