Finalists have been chosen for the 35th annual Triangle Awards, honoring the best LGBTQ books published in 2022. See the many finalists here. Winners in the eight categories will be announced on Thursday, April 27, at a ceremony at the New School in New York City.
In addition, Patrick Califia will receive the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement. Before his gender transition at age 45, Califia was active in the lesbian S/M community and a grassroots organizer of early leatherdyke organizations like Samois, The Lesbian Sex Mafia, and International Ms. Leather. His early writings, including Sapphistry, Macho Sluts, and Public Sex, were touchstones in the feminist sex wars. He is the author of nearly a dozen works of fiction and nonfiction, and he has addressed a wide spectrum of issues related to the repression and stigmatization of pleasure and variant gender expression.
His work as an author and editor includes 10 years of writing an advice column for gay men in the Advocate and serving as the editor of that corporation's erotic magazines. Today he writes for Drummer magazine and is working on a memoir.
Crisosto Apache will receive the Betty Berzon Emerging Writer Award, which goes to an LGBTQ writer who has published at least one book but not more than two. Apache is the author of two books: Ghostword (Gnashing Teeth, 2022) and GENESIS (Lost Alphabet, 2018). Originally from Mescalero, N.Mex., on the Mescalero Apache reservation, they currently live in the Denver metro area, with their spouse. They are an assistant professor of English at the Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design, and they hold an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, N.Mex.
The recipients of the Michele Karlsberg Leadership Award, honoring contributions to LGBTQ literature by those who are not primarily writers, such as editors, agents, booksellers, and institutions, is going to Donnie Jochum and Greg Newton. In 2012, the two founded the Bureau of General Services/Queer Division, which is an independent, all-volunteer queer cultural center, bookstore and event space hosted within the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center in New York City. The Bureau seeks to excite and educate a self-confident, sex-positive, and supportive queer community by offering books, publications, and art, and by hosting readings, performances, film screenings, book discussion groups, and workshops.
And as noted last month, Drag Story Hour NYC will receive the First Publishing Triangle Torchbearer Award.