July Publishing Notes

The buzz: Greenwood Press will publish a three-volume encyclopedia titled LGBTQ America Today in November 2008. According to an article written by Guy Trebay in The New York Times, the book that pregnant father Thomas Beatie was contracted to write, has been shelved. Simon Spotlight Entertainment will publish Christopher Ciccone's Life With My Sister Madonna, based on his life and forty-seven years of growing up with and working with his sister, written with Wendy Leigh. University of Wisconsin Press will publish The Diva Complex: Gay Men on the Women Who Shaped Their Lives, an anthology edited by Michael Montlack, and including writers such as David Trinidad, Lloyd Schwartz, and Wayne Kostenbaum, paying passionate homage to a wide range of divas — among them Julia Child, Wonder Woman, Virginia Woolf, and Margaret Cho. Keith Stern's Queers in History, a reference book of the hundreds of prominent people throughout history who were gay, lesbian, or bisexual, will be published by BenBella Books. Alyson will publish Out Traveler Atlanta by Jordan McCauley with Matt Burkhalter. Del Ray will publish Michael Thomas Ford's Jane Bites Back, a novel about Jane Austen as a modern-day vampire and her frustration with her inability to get another novel published. Senator Larry Craig has announced that he is writing a book. Savannah Knoop, who played the role of JT Leroy in public, is writing a book about the charade for Seven Stories titled Girl Boy Girl: How I Became JT LeRoy. Harmony Books will publish a memoir by Tony winner Patti LuPone, for release in 2010. Novelist Philip Galanes is writing a new etiquette column for The New York Times. Matthew Bourne is choreographing an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray that will premiere in Edinburgh in August. The New York City Opera has commissioned an opera based on "Brokeback Mountain," the Annie Proulx short story that became the basis for the Oscar-winning movie. Charles Wuorinen will compose the opera, which is set to premiere in the spring of 2013. Amazon Bookstore Cooperative in Minneapolis, which had announced plans to close at the end of June has a new owner and will stay in business, according to the Star Tribune. Ruta Skujins, a St. Paul native, will become the first sole owner of the bookshop that was started 38 years ago as a workers' cooperative. Publishers Weekly reported that John Mitzel, proprietor of Calamus Books in Boston, along with 40 other booksellers, had been named in a lawsuit filed by author Larry Townsend for copyright infringement. The suit stems from a dispute over unpaid fees allegedly owed the author by his distributor, Oklahoma-based Nazca Plains Corp. Townsend is the author of The Leatherman's Handbook (and its follow-up, The Leatherman's Handbook II). OutLoud Bookstore in Nashville has been put up for sale by co-owners Ted Jensen and Kevin Medley. Lambda Literary Foundation now has a MySpace page. The Foundation’s 2nd annual Retreat for Emerging LGBT Writers will be held August 10 - 17, 2008. The Atlanta Queer Literary Festival is set for October 15-19, 2008. For more details visit: http://www.atlqueerlitfest.blogspot.com/. A three part video of the Fellow Travelers project, a collection of images of Gay male liberation pioneers taken by Mark Thompson, can be found on YouTube. Julio Vasconcellos and the online Experience Project, have compiled video, photographic, and written testimonials of the recent gay weddings in California. http://www.experienceproject.com/topics/gay_lesbian.php?r=g1. And Metaversal Village is releasing a new video game based on the 1969 Stonewall Riots.

David, David, and more David: Hachette Book Group USA is offering a digital download of the audiobook version of David Sedaris's new When You Are Engulfed in Flames for sale via their Web site — the first time the company has sold directly to consumers from their site. The Observer noted that the book has been characterized as fiction by Barnes & Noble in their weekly bestseller lists. Sedaris told The New York Times, "I've always been a huge exaggerator, but when I write something, I put it on a scale. And if it's 97% true, I think that's true enough. I'm not going to call it fiction because 3% of it isn't true." Sedaris also brought a crowd of over 500 people to Rainy Day Books in Kansas City, setting a new record at the store for staying power—Sedaris, after reading to fans, stayed and signed books for nine and a half hours.

Events of Note: The Lavender Library: The House of Homosexual Culture, Tuesday July 15, 2008, 7.30 p.m., Queen Elizabeth Hall, London. A special festival event celebrating queer literature. Julian Clary, Dave McAlmont, Andy Bell, Maureen Duffy, Stella Duffy, Paul Burston, Karen Mcleod, and Rupert Smith champion their favorite books, and reveal how they've inspired their life and work. More details here: http://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/calendar/productions/the-lavender-library-40977. ** Michael Luongo will be conducting a special photo lecture at the Smithsonian Institute on Buenos Aires, Argentina on Thursday July 17, 2008 in Washington, DC. 6:45 p.m. to 9 p.m., The Smithsonian, S. Dillon Ripley Center, 1100 Jefferson Drive, SW (near 12th Street, SW). (This location is on the Mall next to the Smithsonian Castle.) Metro: Smithsonian Mall Exit (Blue/Orange) Event Code: CODE: 1M2-370. http://residentassociates.org/ticketing/tickets/reserve.aspx?performanceNumber=198536.

Kudos: Canadian poet Rachel Zolf received the Trillium book prize for best poetry book for Human Resources. The Trillium Awards, awarded by the Ontario government, is the province's leading award for literature. Robin Blaser received the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize, the world’s most lucrative poetry award for a single book. Blaser won for his collection The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser, which includes poems written over 50 years. Poet John Ashbery received the international Griffin poetry prize for Notes From the Air: Selected Later Poems. Both awards carry a $50,000 prize. Manuel Muñoz was among the writers awarded a fiction fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Fay Jacobs’ book Fried & True: Tales from Rehoboth Beach won the Delaware Press Association’s 2008 First Place Award for non-fiction humor. Two of her columns from the magazine Letters from Camp Rehoboth were also singled out for prizes. Woof! A Gay Man's Guide to Dogs by Andrew De Prisco was awarded the 2008 Benjamin Franklin Award in the Gay/Lesbian category. Claude J. Summers, general editor of glbtq.com, received the Monette-Horwitz Trust Award at the Lambda Literary Foundation Awards ceremony in West Hollywood, California. The Monette-Horwitz Trust Awards were established in the will of the late novelist Paul Monette to recognize his relationship with the late Roger Horwitz and to honor individuals and organizations for their significant contributions toward eradicating homophobia. The Queer Foundation has announced the recipients of its college scholarships for 2008–2009. They are Christopher Chavez of Phoenix, AZ, Geoffrey Mino of Newtown, PA, and Ericka Sokolower-Shain of Berkeley, CA. Chavez, whose award-winning essay is titled "In or Out," will attend the University of Chicago. Mino's essay is titled "New Youth Rising." He will attend Brown. Sokolower-Shain, who will study at Wesleyan, was recognized for her essay "Beyond the Line." Read more about 2008–2009 recipients at queerfoundation.org.

Golden Crown Finalists: The Golden Crown Literary Society, a literary and educational organization for the study, discussion, enjoyment, and enhancement of lesbian literature will have their 2008 conference in Phoenix, Arizona, from July 31 - August 3, 2008. The Fourth Annual GCLS Literary Awards will be presented on August 2, 2008 at the Wild Horse Pass Resort. Finalists have been announced in eleven categories, including Debut Author, Trailblazer, Popular Choice, Poetry, Dramatic Fiction, Romance, Mystery, Erotica, Speculative Fiction, Anthology, and Short Story, Collection, and can be found on the Society’s Web site: http://www.gclscon.com/2008GCLSAwards-Finalists.html.

Open Calls: Wendell Ricketts, who edited Everything I Have Is Blue, an anthology of writing by working class queers, is seeking fiction, memoir, and poetry submissions for the online Still Blue Project: More Writing By (For or About) Working-Class Queers. Working-class writers of all genders are welcome to submit. There are no limits on subject matter, other than that erotica is not eligible for submission. More details can be found at the Web site: http://www.everythingihaveisblue.com/still_call.html.

Passages: Native American poet, novelist, and scholar Paula Gunn Allen, whose work cleared the path for many Native writers, particularly Native Two-Spirit/GLBTQ folks and Native feminists, died May 29, 2008. She was the author of numerous books and editor of several collections, including Life Is a Fatal Disease: Collected Poems 1962-1995 and The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Her writing was inspired by Pueblo tales and is noted for its strong political streak. Her novel, The Woman Who Owned The Shadows, was published in 1983. The story revolves around Ephanie, a mixed-blood like Allen herself, and her struggle to express herself creatively. Allen was awarded a 2007 Lannan Foundation Fellowship and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writer's Circle of the Americas in 2001. In 2004 she received a Pulitzer Prize nomination for her book Pocahontas: Medicine Woman, Spy, Entrepreneur, Diplomat. ** Jonathan Williams, the founder of the Jargon Society, the small publishing house in the western mountains of North Carolina, died on March 16, 2008 in Highlands, N.C. He was 79 and lived and worked in Scaly Mountain, N.C. The cause was pneumonia. Williams authored more than 25 books during his lifetime. Williams was also an accomplished photographer whose images of writers, artists, gravestones and natural landscapes are housed at Yale University. Williams founded The Jargon Society at age 21 and published 113 books during his lifetime. Guided by his quixotic mission — "To keep afloat the Ark of Culture in these dark and tacky times" — it spotlighted talented but neglected poets, writers and artists, including Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Guy Davenport, Louis Zukofsky, Paul Metcalf, Mina Loy and Lorine Niedecker. Among his awards were a Guggenheim fellowship and NEA grants. Williams is survived by his partner of 40 years, Thomas Meyer. ** Michael Jon Shernoff, a psychotherapist for more than 30 years, a prodigious writer, a professor, and an LGBT, AIDS, and environmental activist, died on June 17, 2008 at his home in New York City at the age of 57. The cause of death was pancreatic cancer, according to his partner of nine years, John Goodman. Gay City News reported that Shernoff published more than 60 articles, mostly related to mental health issues involving gay men, sexuality, and mental health. He edited seven anthologies, including Gay Widowers: Life After the Death of a Partner. In 2006, Routledge published Shernoff's book, Without Condoms: Unprotected Sex, Gay Men and Barebacking. Donations in his memory can be made to the LGBT Community Center, 208 West 13th Street, New York 10011; The Nature Conservancy, 4245 North Fairfax Drive, Suite 100, Arlington, Virginia, 22203; and Lambda Legal, 120 Wall Street, Suite 1500, New York 10005.

June Publishing Notes

The buzz: St. Martin’s Press will publish Thomas Beatie’s memoir, Love Makes A Family: A Memoir of Hardship, Healing and an Extraordinary Pregnancy, about the author’s transformation from a girl scout and beauty queen to a legal and recognized man with a black belt in marital arts and a loving wife — and their controversial decision to have Thomas — who underwent gender reassignment surgery but kept his female reproductive organs — get pregnant and carry their child. Book packager LifeTime Media will start their own publishing program with Pressure Is A Privilege: Lessons I’ve Learned from Live and the Battle of the Sexes by tennis legend Billie Jean King. In the fall of 2009, Doubleday will publish Joseph Papp and Kenneth Turan’s Free For All, the definitive oral history of The New York Shakespeare Festival and the Public Theater. Gival Press will publish Chip Livingston’s poetry collection, The Museum of False Starts. Lethe Press is reissuing Salvatore Sapienza’s novel, Seventy Times Seven. Cambridge House will publish in the fall of 2009 Jeffrey Duban's Sappho of Lesbos: Contemporary Translations in Archaic Greek Love Lyric, a translation of poems and fragments by Sappho and her contemporaries, with detailed introductions, poem-by-poem commentary, and incisive discussion of the art of translation. JoSelle Vanderhooft's The Memory Palace, a growing up gay memoir structured around the Renaissance mnemonic device of a building with rooms populated by thoughts and objects, will be published in January 2009. And Tango Makes Three, the 2005 picture book that features a baby penguin with two dads, held the top spot as the American Library Association's most challenged book in public schools and libraries for the second year in a row. Author Chuck Palahniuk gave a revealing interview to Austin Bunn for the Advocate, which is available online at the magazine’s Web site. Author Anne Rice donated an authentic Chinese wedding dress for a special ebay auction to benefit the Lambda Literary Foundation and its Retreat for Emerging LGBT Writers. Jim McDonough’s popular Web site Queerwriters.com has migrated to a Ning community. Sapphic Planet, a group for authors who write lesbian fiction, now has a Web site, a MySpace and Glee page. New York’s LGBT film festival, NewFest is showing film adaptations of Sarah Waters' Affinity and Jim Grimsley's Dream Boy. Wayne Hoffman’s short story “Sucker,” an excerpt from his novel Hard, has been adapted into a short film, and is also having its NYC premiere at the festival as part of a program of sexy short films called “Sweat.” Sigourney Weaver has signed to star in a Lifetime movie adaptation of Leroy Aaron’s Prayers for Bobby, about a devout Christian woman who questions her faith after her gay son commits suicide. And Nicole Kidman will play singer Dusty Springfield in a movie being written by Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham.

Things to add to your calendar: Queer Women Reading Poetry, hosted by Alix Olson at the Leslie/Lohman Gallery, June 12 at 6:30 pm, 26 Wooster Street, NYC. Poets include Sini Anderson, Kate Broad, Cheryl Burke, Staceyann Chinn, r. erica doyle, Stephanie Gray, Tracy Grinnell, Sue Landers, Sara marcus, Marty McConnell, Lenelle Moise and Elizabeth Redddin. A limited edition chapbook containing work from the poets scheduled to read will be available for purchase. ** That's Revolting!: Radical queer activism — past, present, and future. Thursday, June 5, 6pm, San Francisco Main Library Latino/Hispanic Meeting Room (downstairs), 100 Larkin Street. With Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and Carol Queen, Bo Brown, Ralowe T. Ampu, Tommi Avicolli Mecca, Eric Stanley, and Gina de Vries. ** This is the Thing by Kirk Read, an evening of stories about sex work, hallucinations and the apocalypse, with music by Jeffrey Alphonsus Mooney, video by Liz Singer, props and design by Doug Hansen and Kirk Read, at the Garage, 975 Howard @ 6th Street, San Francisco, June 10-14, 2008 Tuesday through Saturday, 8pm. Tickets: $12-15, 1-800-838-3006.

Kudos: Author, editor and journalist Michael T. Luongo was awarded the Reporting Award at the Society for Professional Journalist's New York Deadline Club Awards for his November 2007 story “Our Man in Baghdad,” which was published in the New York City weekly Gay City News. The story focuses on the hidden gay life in Iraq, with Luongo meeting some of the hundreds of Iraqi men with Gaydar profiles, both to his and their great peril. ** Ken Anderson was the winner of the 2008 Saints & Sinners Playwriting Contest for Someone Bought the House on the Island. ** IPPY Awards (Independent Publisher Book Awards) in the Gay/Lesbian category went to: Gold: First Person Queer: Who We Are (So Far), ed. Richard Labonté and Lawrence Schimel, Silver: Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women's Love and Desire, by Lisa M. Diamond, and Bronze: The Brides of March, by Beren de Motier; Carnal Sacraments, by Perry Brass; A Hint of Homosexuality? by Bruce H. Joffe. A Gold Award in the Erotica category went to Erotic Interludes 5: Road Games, edited by Radclyffe and Stacia Seaman. A Gold Award went to Tips on Having a Gay (ex) Boyfriend, by Carrie Jones in the Juvenile/Young Adult Fiction category.

Lamba Literary Winners: LGBT ANTHOLOGY: First Person Queer, edited by Richard Labonté and Lawrence Schimel ; LGBT ARTS & CULTURE: The View From Here by Matthew Hays; LGBT CHILDREN'S/YOUNG ADULT: Hero by Perry Moore; LGBT DRAMA/THEATER: Return to the Caffe Cino, edited by Steve Susoyev and George Birimisa; LGBT EROTICA: Homosex, Simon Sheppard; LGBT NONFICTION: Gay Artists in Modern American Culture, Michael S. Sherry; LGBT POETRY: Blackbird and Wolf, Henri Cole; LGBT SCI-FI/FANTASY/HORROR: The Dust of Wonderland, Lee Thomas; LGBT STUDIES: Between Women, Sharon Marcus; BISEXUAL: Split Screen, Brett Hartinger; TRANSGENDER: Transparent, Cris Beam; LESBIAN DEBUT FICTION: Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking, Aoibheann Sweeney; GAY DEBUT FICTION: A Push and a Shove, Christopher Kelly; WOMEN'S FICTION: The IHOP Papers, Ali Leibegott; WOMEN'S ROMANCE: Out of Love, KG MacGregor; WOMEN'S MYSTERY: Wall of Silence, Gabrielle Goldsby; WOMEN'S MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY: And Now We Are Going to Have a Party, Nicola Griffith; MEN'S FICTION: Call Me By Your Name, Andre Aciman; MEN's ROMANCE: Changing Tides, Michael Thomas Ford; MEN's MYSTERY: Murder in the Rue Chartres, Greg Herren; MEN'S MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY: Mississippi Sissy, Kevin Sessums.

Open Calls: New Town Writers is sponsoring the Swell Fiction Contest. Deadline is September 30, 2008 for unpublished stories of up to 5000 words. There is an $8 entry fee. For more details visit http://www.swellzine.com/. ** Felice Newman, author of The Whole Lesbian Sex Book, is looking for lesbian, bisexual and queer women couples who have you been together for more than five years for research for a new sex guide for lesbian couples. Confidential interviews (via telephone) will be done with couples who enjoy a satisfying sexual relationship. Inquiries can be sent to felice@felicenewman.com. ** Subaru and the Logo Channel are teaming up to produce a series of short portrait documentaries called “Real Momentum Profiles,” featuring Subaru owners. The producers are seeking gay men and women who own Subarus. Singles and couples are encouraged to submit a photograph along with a short questionnaire available from subarulogocasting@gmail.com.

Passages: Nuala O'Faolain, author and former Irish Times columnist, died of lung cancer on May 9, 2008 at the age of 68 in Dublin. She had been living in County Clare and New York City. She was the author of the 1996 memoir, Are You Somebody?, an unblinking and unsentimental description of Irish life in the 1940s and '50s. ** Robert Rauschenberg, whose use of odd and everyday articles earned him a reputation as a pioneer in pop art but whose talents spanned the worlds of painting, sculpture, and dance, died May 12, 2008. He was 82. Rauschenberg, born in 1925, met Jasper Johns in 1954. He and the younger artist became lovers and influenced each other's work. According to the book Lives of the Great 20th Century Artists, Rauschenberg told biographer Calvin Tomkins that ''Jasper and I literally traded ideas. He would say, 'I've got a terrific idea for you,' and then I'd have to find one for him.'' In recent years Rauschenberg founded the organization Change Inc., which helps struggling artists pay medical bills.

May Publishing Notes

The buzz: PlanetOut, Inc. announced that it was selling its magazine and book publishing businesses -- including The Advocate, Out, and Alyson Books -- to Regent Releasing for $6 million. Regent is an affiliate of the Here! cable network. Film director Stephen Daldry, who arrives on Broadway with a musical version of his film Billy Elliot, has expressed interest in adapting another one of his films, The Hours, based on Michael Cunningham’s novel, into an opera. Musician Rufus Wainwright has been commissioned to write an opera by the New York Metropolitan Opera. Ang Lee and Focus Features are planning a feature film based on the gay-themed memoir Taking Woodstock, by Elliot Tiber with Tom Monte. A paperback tie in with the movie, expected in 2009, will also coincide with the 40th anniversary of Woodstock. Tony-winner (Take Me Out) Richard Greenberg’s new play, The Injured Party, debuted last month in Los Angeles at South Coast Repertory. Harper Perennial will publish a new collection of short fiction by Dennis Cooper, Ugly Man, in the Summer of 2009. Knopf will publish Emma Donoghue's Lesbian Plots: From Geoffrey Chaucer to Sarah Waters. Ballantine will publish Rita Mae Brown's Pure Gold, a memoir about the animals in the author’s life. Performance artist Terry Galloway's Mean Little Deaf Queer, about being gay and disabled, will be published by Beacon Press in the Spring of 2009. Beacon will also publish Kate Clinton’s untitled book project in the Spring of 2009. Patrick Conlon's The Essential Hospital Handbook will be published by Yale University Press in the Spring of 2009. Atlantic Books will publish Edmund White's biography Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel. Bowen Press, the young adult division of HarperCollins, will publish Tom Dolby's Secret Society, about a group of Manhattan teens who are inducted into an elite secret society headquartered on the Upper East Side, in the Summer of 2009. Editors Vince Liaguno and Chad Helder are revealing the table of contents of their new queer-themed horror anthology Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of the Closet one day at a time during the month of May on their Web site for Dark Scribe Magazine. King & King, a children’s picture book with positive gay role models, was withdrawn from two British elementary schools under pressure from Muslim parents. Activist and author Larry Kramer sent a critical letter to the head of the literary organization PEN American Center blasting the association for featuring few LGBT authors at an international literature festival it hosted. Kramer also took aim at PEN Board member Michael Cunningham. Rob Weisbach is stepping down as President and CEO of Weinstein Books to pursue other publishing opportunities. Keith Kahla, who has been at St. Martin’s Press for 20 years, has been promoted to Executive Editor. Longtime New Yorker Charles Flowers is relocating to Los Angeles along with establishing a west coast beachhead of the Lambda Literary Foundation. Playwright Robert Patrick is honoring the life of Joe Cino, owner of former Caffe Cino, with a solid bronze plaque to be mounted on the site of the Caffe, now the home of Po Restaurant at 31 Cornelia Street in New York. Fifty years ago Joe Cino rented a storefront in New York City’s Greenwich Village in order to open a coffee house, which eventually morphed into what is now regarded as the birthplace of the Off Off Broadway movement and the American Gay Theatre Movement. Rapture Café & Books in the East Village in New York closed April 24, 2008. The store will continue to host reading events at other locations. Owners Jim Deva and Bruce Smyth of Little Sister’s Book & Art Emporium in Vancouver, who challenged Canada’s Customs agents and censorship laws, has put the bookstore up for sale. Michael Walker and the DREAMWalker Group are now producing a regular newsletter of interest to LGBT writers and is open for submissions and suggestions. Visit the Web site at http://www.dreamwalkergroup.com/ for more details. The New York Public Library now has a LGBT blog at http://lgbt.nypl.org/.

Things to add to your calendar: The 20th Lambda Literary Awards ceremony will be held May 29, 2008 in West Hollywood, on the eve of Book Expo’s opening weekend in Los Angeles. Michael Corbett will be master of ceremonies and guest presenters include Bernard Cooper, Felice Picano, Torie Osborn, Michael Nava, Lillian Faderman, Chad Allen, Peter Paige, Denise Penn, Anne Stockwell, and Calpernia. Guest performers will be the Gay Men’s Chorus, Tim Miller, and the Gay Mafia. ** Gayfest NYC, a festival of new plays and musicals, will run from May 14 to June 15, 2008. ** The annual Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans will be May 8 – 11, 2008. ** The Second Tuesday Lecture Series on May 13 at the LGBT Center in New York City will feature writers Perry Brass, Laura Antoniou and Michael Luongo discussing "The Literature of Porn."

Kudos: Martin Duberman was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography for The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein and Alex Ross was a finalist in the General Nonfiction category for The Rest Is Noise. Making the New York Public Library’s list of 25 books to remember from 2007 were Hotel de Dream by Edmund White and The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt. Maureen Brady, Joan Larkin, Stephen McCauley, and Tim Miller will be inducted into the Saints and Sinners Hall of Fame at this year’s Literary Festival in New Orleans. Also to be announced are the winners of the Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists’ Prize – an unrestricted cash grant of $5,000 established by Jim Duggins. This year’s honorees are Michelle Tea and Ronald L. Donaghe. Gaylaxicon 2009 will be October 9-11, 2009 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Margaret Weis, Andy Mangels, and Lawrence Schimel will be the guests of honor.

Publishing Triangle Nods: Joan Larkin was presented The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry for My Body. There was a tie for The Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry. The winners were Steve Fellner for Blind Date with Cavafy and Daniel Hall for Under Sleep . Myriam Gurba received The Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction for Dahlia Season. The Ferro Grumley Awards for LGBT Fiction were presented to Peter Cameron for Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You and Ali Liebegott for The IHOP Papers. Janet Malcolm was presented The Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction for Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice. Michael Rowe received The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction for Other Men's Sons. The Publishing Triangle Leadership Award was presented to Richard Labonté and Carol Seajay. Katherine V. Forrest received The Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Open Calls: GotCast.com is casting a new game show titled My Gay BFF, about the friendships between straight women and their gay best friends. Visit the Web site for more details and audition information.

April Publishing Notes

The buzz: Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City is becoming a theatrical musical. Avenue Q book writer Jeff Whitty and Scissor Sisters bandmates Jason Sellards and John Garden are penning the musical, due on Broadway during the 2009-10 season. Gayfest NYC will present their opening gala benefit event on April 14, 2008 with Leslie Jordan’s one man act, My Trip Down the Pink Carpet. Proceeds will go to the Harvey Milk High School. BBC is turning Simon Doonan’s memoir, Nasty: My Family and Other Glamorous Varmints, into the television show Beautiful People. The PEN American Center is trying to get Sebastian Horsley allowed on U.S. soil. The British writer, who wrote the memoir Dandy in the Underworld, was barred from entering the country on the grounds of "moral turpitude" after landing in Newark on March 18. Author John Rechy, author of the legendary City of Night, marks fifty years with Grove Press with About My Life and the Kept Woman. Harmony Books will publish Wade Rouse’s The Faux Thoreau: A City Boy Battles Blizzards, Wrestles Raccons and Cuts Cable in a Quest for his Modern-Day Walden Pond. Author Lewis DeSimone has launched a new blog: http://sexandthesissy.wordpress.com/. Bookazine has acquired the assets of the book distribution division of Publishers Distributing Company, part of the PlanetOut media company. Among the publishers affected by the sale are Bruno Gmunder Verlag, Starbooks Press, Colt Studio, and Douglas Simonson Press. Julia Pastore has started a new lesbian reading group. Contact her at jpastore@randomhouse.com if interested in joining.

Poetry in Ireland Continues: Pinknews.co.uk reported that The National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) in Ireland said that works by Cathal O’Searcaigh, a poet accused of sexually exploiting young men in Nepal, will continue to be taught in schools. Education Minister Mary Hanafin has been advised by the council: "On balance, the Council considered that its original position on the artistic merit and suitability for study of the work of Cathal O'Searcaigh should stand." O’Searcaigh, whose Irish language works are taught at Leaving Certificate, the equivalent of A Level, had been accused of the "sexual exploitation and grooming" of 16 year old Nepalese boys. Allegations about the poet's relationship with the young boys surfaced after the screening of Fairytale of Kathmandu, a documentary on Mr Searcaigh's charitable work in Nepal made by a former friend of his. The poet wrote a letter denouncing the accusations, saying: "If my gay lifestyle and relationships in Nepal have offended anyone, I am sorry. But to suggest that I in any way coerced or preyed upon these young men is untrue and distasteful. My relationships in Nepal have always been open and loving and above board." Opposition education spokesman Brian Hayes challenged Ms Hanafin on the "appropriateness or otherwise" of having the work on the current syllabus. The minister - who recently had to defend her actions in helping Mr Searcaigh secure a visa to Ireland for a Nepalese friend - said she was "shocked and appalled" by the allegations.

Kudos: David Leavitt was named a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for his novel, The Indian Clerk. Leslea Newman has been selected Poet Laureate of Northhampton, Massachusetts.

And The Nominees Are: Katharine Forrest will be presented with the Publishing Triangle’s Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award. The awards -- including the Ferro-Grumley Fiction Awards, The Shilts-Grahn Nonfiction Awards, The Lorde-Gunn Poetry Awards, The Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, and The Publishing Triangle Leadership Award -- will be announced on April 28, 2008 at the Tishman Auditorium at the New School in Greenwich Village, New York City. For a list of the nominated books, visit the Publishing Triangle’s Web site.

The 20th Lambda Literary Awards will be presented Thursday, May 29, 2008 at the Silver Screen Theater, Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, CA. Ann Bannon, Malcolm Boyd, and Mark Thompson will receive Pioneer Awards. Nominations in the 21 literary categories can be found on the Foundation’s Web site.

Open Calls: Limp Wrist, a new literary journal, is accepting fiction and poetry submissions. The first issue will be this spring. More details can be found at http://www.limpwristmag.com/. ** Seven Kitchens Press is accepting submissions for the Robin Becker Chapbook Prize. Deadline is May 15, 2008. More details can be found at http://sevenkitchens.blogspot.com/.

Passages: Sir Arthur C. Clarke died March 18, 2008 at the age of 90 in Sri Lanka. He was the author of more than 100 books, among them Childhood’s End and The Sentinel, which was made into the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. Clarke was never open about his homosexuality. In his later years, he was fond of saying, "At my age, now I'm just a little bit cheerful." With the stipulation that they not be published until 50 years after his death, his "Clarkives," a vast collection of private writings, is expected to reveal his homosexuality, even though it's a widely accepted fact among the author's fans.

March Publishing Notes

The buzz: The London Evening Standard's theatre critic Nicholas de Jongh has turned playwright to write Plague Over England, a new play about Sir John Gielgud’s triumphant return from a 1953 gay sex scandal, which recently debuted in London at the Finborough Theater. Two plays based on the 1920s Leopold and Loeb crimes recently opened in LA: Thrill Me by Stephen Dolginoff and Dickie and Babe by Daniel Henning. The restless yearning towards my Self, a poem by Perry Brass set to music by Paula M. Kimper, will debut in New York City this month. Bash’d, a gay rap opera by Chris Craddock and Nathan Cuckow, with music by Aaron Macri, is gearing up for a commercial off-Broaway run. Mike Jones, the escort who exposed Ted Haggard in a sex scandal, will play himself in a new one-man show, Naked Before God, in Denver in March. Novelist Frank Anthony Pollo is urging a boycott of the film version of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, based on the novel by Michael Chabon, because the adaptation cuts out the gay character of Arthur. Details are at Pollo’s MySpace page: www.myspace.com/mysteriesofpittsburgh. Kensington will publish Pollo’s novel, Band Fags!, in June. Timothy State’s blog Balancing Boyfriends is excerpted in the Japanese-English text book, Try Reading Blogs in English, published by Tokyo’s Kosaido Publishing Company. Writer and editor Michael Luongo is teaching travel writing courses at NYU this month and in Tuscany in May for the Il Chiostro program. Simon & Schuster will publish Gary Marmorstein’s Lorenz Hart: An American Life. Writer and editor Steve Berman found so many worthy stories to include in his planned Best Gay Fiction 2008 that he is spinning off a second anthology of speculative fiction from the entries, titled Wilde Side. Both titles will be available by late spring. Prime Books is also reprinting Berman’s earlier anthology of queer fairie stories, So Fey. David Sedaris has changed the title of his new book of essays from All the Beauty You’ll Ever Need to When You Are Engulfed in Flames. Release date is June 3 with a print run of 650,000 copies. An appeals judge tossed out a Lexington, Massachsuetts couple’s case against their child’s school, which had the audacity to read a fairy tale about two kings in love. Lambda Rising’s Baltimore LGBT bookstore will close this spring, but longtime Lambda Rising Baltimore store manager Michael Leommon plans to open Saratoga Coffee Bar in Baltimore, a café that will also sell books. Amazon Bookstore Cooperative, a feminist and LGBT bookstore in South Minneapolis is being sold, because of the financial condition of the store. The bookstore is the oldest feminist bookstore in the country. Amazon Bookstore gained fame as part of a highly publicized lawsuit against Amazon.com in the late 1990s.

Kudos: Freeheld: The Laurel Hester Story, Cynthia Wade’s documentary about the New Jersey lesbian police officer’s struggle to have her domestic partner recognized as her next of kin, won the Oscar for Best Documentary. Winners of the The Gaylactic Spectrum Awards for Short Fiction, representing the best science fiction, fantasy or horror short fiction with significant positive GLBT content, are “In the Quake Zone” by David Gerrold from the anthology Down These Dark Spaceways, “Instinct” by Joy Parks from the anthology The Future Is Queer, and “The Language of Moths” by Christopher Barzak from the magazine Realms of Fantasy. In the Other Work category, the three winners are: the anthology The Future Is Queer, edited by Richard Labonte and Lawrence Schimel, the television series Torchwood, created by Russell T Davies, and the film V for Vendetta, directed by James McTeigue. The juries for the awards also identified a Short List of Recommended works, which can be found at http://www.spectrumawards.org/. Nominations for the 2008 Awards are open and the 2008 Awards will be presented at Gaylaxicon 2008 in Washington DC in October 2008.

Open Calls: Editor Richard Labonté is seeking stories for the 2009 edition of Best Gay Erotica, which will be judged this season by James Lear. Deadline is April 15, 2008. Original stories of 6000 words or less or work published between July 2007 and July 2008 are eligible. Submissions should be sent to mailto:bge2008@gmail.com in *.doc format. ** Labonté is also editing several other anthologies for Cleis Press, including Bears: Gay Erotic Stories. Deadline is March 15, 2008, and stories should be 8000 words or less. Submissions should be sent to cleiseditor@gmail.com. ** For Best Gay Romance 2009, stories should be 6000 words or less. Deadline: May 20, 2008. Submissions to cleiseditor@gmail.com; please put BGR 2009 in the subject line. ** For the erotic anthology Daddies: Gay Erotic Fiction, Labonté is looking for stories 6000 words or less. Deadline is Aug. 15, 2008. Submissions to: cleiseditor@gmail.com; please put "Daddies" in the subject line. ** For the erotic anthology Boy Crazy: The First Time, Labonté is looking for sexual/erotic coming-out short stories, 6000 words or less. Deadline is Oct. 15, 2008. Submissions to cleiseditor@gmail.com; please put"Boy Crazy" in the subject line. ** The British queer literary journal Chroma is planning a themed issue on the “Americas.” Deadline is August 15, 2008. ** Chroma is also sponsoring its Queer Writing Competition in Poetry and Short Story. Deadline is September 1, 2008. For more details visit the Chroma Web site. **

February Publishing Notes

The buzz: Harper will publish George Michael’s “no-holds barred” autobiography in the fall of 2009. Rosie O’Donnell is rumored to be at work on a one-woman show. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel has been appointed an adjunct professor and the chairwoman of the playwriting department at Yale School of Drama. Author, comedian, and daytime TV host Ellen DeGeneres ousted talk show queen Oprah Winfrey as the U.S.'s favorite television personality in a poll released in January. Among the recent films showcased at Sundance was an adaptation of Michael Cabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Logo will air a prequel series to the play and movie Sordid Lives this fall The series will include guest appearances by Leslie Jordan, Margaret Cho, and others. Editor-in-chief Will Schwalbe has left Hyperion to pursue the next chapter in his career. This fall City Lights will publish So Many Ways to Sleep Badly, a new novel by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. Susie Bright is headed on a farewell tour for Best American Erotica. Details can be found at http://booktour.com/author/susie_bright and http://www.bestamericanerotica.com/. Susie is also writing a memoir and has signed on to edit two new anthologies for Chronicle Books. The Sex Workers Art Show tour is going to 38 cities in 41 days in January and February. The full schedule can be found at http://sexworkersartshow.com/tourschedule.html and http://sexworkersartshow.com/newbook.html. Also featured at the show will be a new anthology of sex worker writings, Working Sex: Sex Workers Write About a Changing Industry, edited by Annie Oakley, and featuring work by several of the show’s performers, as well as Eileen Myles, Bruce LaBruce, Nomy Lamm, and Michelle Tea.

Kudos: The winners of the 2008 Stonewall Book Awards are: The Barbara Gittings Book Award in Literature to Ellis Avery for The Tea House Fire, and The Israel Fishman Book Award for Nonfiction to Mark Doty for Dog Years: A Memoir. The 2008 honor books in literature are: Bow Grip by Ivan E. Coyote, Dark Reflections by Samuel R. Delany, The IHOP Papers by Ali Liebegott, and The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt. The honor books in non-fiction are: Grand Surprise: The Journals of Leo Lerman by Leo Lerman and Stephen Pascal, Mississippi Sissy by Kevin Sessums, Transparent: Love, Family, and Living the T with Transgender Teenagers by Cris Beam, and Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice by Janet Malcolm. The Alice B. Reader’s Appreciation Awards given annually to living writers for career achievement of distinguished stories about lesbians were presented to: Kim Baldwin, Ann Bannon, Cate Culpepper, Lauren Wright Douglas, Jennifer L. Jordan, Val McDermid, Joanna Russ, and Therese Szymanski. Vintage by Steve Berman has made the long list for the Andrew Norton Award given to young adult novels of speculative fiction. GLAAD does not present book awards, but the GLAAD Media Awards include categories for comic books and theater. The nominations in the Comic Book category of the GLAAD Media Awards went to: American Virgin by Steven T. Seagle, The Boys by Garth Ennis, Midnighter by Garth Ennis, Brian K. Vaughan, Christos Gage, Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti, and Keith Giffin, The Outsiders by Judd Winick, Greg Rucka, and Tony Bedard, and Strangers in Paradise by Terry Moore. Theater nominees for LA Theater are: Act A Lady by Jordan Harrison, Anything by Tim McNeil, Avenue Q, book by Jeff Whitty, music and lyrics by Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, Havana Bourgeois by Carlos Lacamara, and The Long Christmas Ride Home by Paula Vogel. For New York Theater – Broadway & Off–Broadway: 100 Saints You Should Know by Kate Fodor, All That I Will Ever Be by Alan Ball, The Beebo Brinker Chronicles by Kate Moira Ryan and Linda S. Chapman, Some Men by Terrence McNally, and Speech & Debate by Stephen Karam. For Off–Off Broadway: 1001 Beds by Tim Miller, BASH’d: A Gay Rap Opera by Chris Craddock and Nathan Cuckow, music by Aaron Macri, I Google Myself by Jason Schafer, Yank! book and lyrics by David Zellnik, music by Joseph Zellnik, The Young Ladies Of by Taylor Mac. San Francisco’s Theater Rhinoceros will receive a special recognition.

Open Calls: White Crane Institute in collaboration with Phil Willkie has established the biennial White Crane/James White Poetry Prize for Gay male poets. Mark Doty will be the judge for the first year. The award will be presented in spring 2009 to mark the twentieth anniversary of the White Crane Journal. A prize of $1,000, publication by White Crane Books, and five author copies will be given annually for a book-length poetry collection. Submit 48 to 80 pages of poetry with a $25 entry fee, postmarked by October 30, 2008. Visit the White Crane web site (http://www.gaywisdom.org/) for complete guidelines. For further information, write info@jameswhitepoetryprize.org.

January Publishing Notes

The buzz: Augusten Burroughs’ new memoir, A Wolf At The Table, is expected to be in stores this April. Rich Merritt, author of the new novel, Code of Conduct, has launched a Web site and a blog for writers at http://www.richmerritt.com/. Andy Quan’s new book of poetry, Bowling Pin Fire, is now in bookstores. Kensington will publish Rakesh Satyal’s Blue Boy, about a sexually confused Indian-American boy who thinks he may be the reincarnation of the Hindu god Krishna. The Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris has opened “L’Enfer,” its secret collection of erotic manuscripts and art, to the public for the first time in nearly 40 years. The collection, amassed over 170 years, includes manuscripts by the Marquis de Sade. Letters to Noel Coward, a new book edited by Barry Day, revealed that Noel Coward served as a British spy before and during World War II. Little Britain star David Walliams has signed a two-book deal with Harper Collins Children’s Books. His untitled debut novel is expected in the Autumn of 2008. Chad Allen is expected to star in a third in the Donald Strachey mysteries for Here! TV. Rupert Everett will write and act in a movie about Oscar Wilde. Ewan McGregor and Jim Carrey have signed on to star in I Love You Phillip Morris, based on the book by Steve Russell. Among the talent lining up for Gus Van Sant’s film of The Mayor of Castro Street are Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, James Franco as Milk’s longterm partner Scott Smith, Josh Brolin as Dan White, and Emile Hirsch as Milk’s aide Cleve Jones.

Kudos: C. Bard Cole won the 2007 Novel of Novels contest for This is Where My Life Went Wrong. It will be the first book-length work of fiction to be published by Blatt Books. Among Out magazine’s annual list of notable queers were writers Edmund White, Kevin Sessums, Thomas Mallon, Eliot Schrefer, Kim Powers, Lori Sonderlind, and editor Will Schwalbe. Arch Brown’s Palm Spring’s Thorny Theater won four Desert Theater League Star Awards including Best Original Writing for David Brendan Hopes for his play Anna Livia, Lucky in her Bridges, and Best Overall Production for Arch Brown's Doubleltalk. Artist Delmas Howe will receive the 2008 Lifetime Achievement award from the Leslie/Lohman Art Foundation for his contribution to gay art.

Open Calls: The Queer Foundation, a Washington nonprofit corporation, will offer the three winners of its 2008 High School Seniors English Essay Contest College scholarships in the amount of $1,000 for studies in queer theory or a related field at a US college. Deadline is February 29, 2008. More details can be found at the Web site. ** Richard Labonté and Lawrence Schimmel are seeking submissions for Queer Utopias, a science fiction anthology, to be published by Arsenal Pulp Press, Spring 2009. Maximum word length: 10,000 words. Submissions can be sent as an attachment in .doc format to queerutopias@gmail.com. Deadline is May 15, 2008. ** The Leslie/Lohman Gallery accepting submissions for four large group art exhibitions in 2008. The Great Gay Photo Show, a large group photography show; Art! Actually! Painting, Drawing, Sculpture, about the act of making art, The Great Lesbian Show, a large group lesbian show, and Imaginary Portraits: Gay Lovers In History, a large group show of portraits based on known or newly discovered LGBTQ couples from ancient to contemporary society. For more details on deadlines and submission requirements, please visit the gallery’s Web site.

My Favorites of 2007: Favorite novel: Michael Tolliver Lives by Armistead Maupin. The trip down memory lane was unforgettable. Favorite memoir: Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. Deserves every award it received. Favorite story: “Love and Hydrogen” by Jim Shepard -- I finally caught up with this ill-fated romance that takes place on board the Hindenburg. Favorite movie: La Vie en Rose. Marion Cottilard is amazing as Edith Piaf.

Passages: Historian Allan Bérubé died of complications from stomach ulcers at the Catskills Regional Medical Center in New York on December 11, 2007. He was 61. Berbe was the author of Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II, published in 1990 and which won a Lambda Literary Award and was adapted as a documentary by Arthur Dong. In 1996, Bérubé received a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for his work. He was also one of the founders of the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Project in 1978. He is survived by his partner John Nelson, his mother, and three sisters. ** Mel Cheren, a pioneering force in the dance music movement of the '70s and an AIDS activist, died December 7, 2007, from complications of AIDS. He was 74. Known as the “Godfather Of Disco,” Cheren co-founded West End Records in 1976. Cheren was a key backer of the Paradise Garage, a nightclub in the West Village. Cheren gave Gay Men’s Health Crisis its first home, donating space for it in a building he owned in Chelsea, and sponsored its first fund-raiser, at the Paradise Garage. Cheren also started 24 Hours For Life in 1987, a non-profit organization of music and media professionals who raised money for AIDS awareness. In 2000, Cheren published a memoir, My Life and the Paradise Garage: Keep on Dancin', which became the basis of a feature length documentary, suitably titled The Godfather of Disco.

December Publishing Notes

The buzz: Duke University Press will publish Our Caribbean, A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, edited by Thomas Glave. Starbooks Press has published Ken Anderson’s collection of stories, The Statue of Pan. Among the forthcoming Spring 2008 releases are The First Man-Made Man: The Story of Two Sex Changes, One Love Affair, and a Twentieth-Century Medical Revolution by Pagan Kennedy and Straight Acting: Gay Men, Masculinity and Finding True Love by Angelo Pezzote. Former Blithe House Quarterly editor and publisher Aldo Alvarez is teaching a Gay & Lesbian literature class at Wilbur Wright College in Chicago. British actors and authors Stephen Fry and Simon Callow are planning to turn a London house where French poet Paul Verlaine stayed with Arthur Rimbaud into a museum dedicated to poetry, “a wonderful memento of the fruitful if nightmarish stay in England of these extraordinary men, of the work they did there, and indeed, of their affair,” according to a statement made by Callow. Authors Rob Stephenson, Rachel Bussel Kramer, and Amie Evans will read from Entangled Lives, an anthology of erotic memoirs edited by Marilyn Jaye Lewis, Saturday, December 8, 2007, at 7 p.m. at Rapture Cafe and Books in Manhattan.

Kudos: Daniel Mendelsohn is the winner of the Prix Medicis for a foreign work for The Lost. Making the list of The New York Times Notable Books for 2007 were Fellow Travelers by Thomas Mallon, The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt, Mothers and Sons by Colm Toibin, and Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice by Janet Malcolm. The longlist for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award includes Winkie by Clifford Chase and The Night Watch by Sarah Waters. On Publishers Weekly Best Books of the Year for 2007 was Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman.

Open Calls: Shonia L. Brown is seeking erotica submissions of 4000 words or less for I Love You to Death: Black Lesbian Diaries. Submissions can be sent to: Nghosi Books, PO Box 1908, Stone Mountain GA 30086. Include a brief author bio and e-mail address. Deadline is October 31, 2008. ** Christopher Pierce is editing Taken By Force: Erotic Stories of Abduction and Captivity for STARbooks Press. Deadline is January 20, 2008. Stories can be sent as .doc attachment to:mailto:%20pierce@starbookspress.com with Taken By Force in the subject line. ** SPUTNIK57, a new online magazine, is seeking science fiction, fantasy, and horror short story submissions. Stories should contain strong female protagonists, and lesbian characters who are portrayed in a positive light. Stories should be between 1000 and 15,000 words in length. Submissions should be sent as an e-mail attachment, either as a rtf or a Word document to submissions@sputnik57.ca. ** The online journal Ignavia is seeking dark, edgy, queer fiction under 4000 words. Visit the Web site for specific guidelines. ** Patty G. Henderson is editing Chilling Tales of Terror and the Supernatural: In 1,000 Words or Less, a lesbian/gay anthology of horror flash fiction. Each author will get a ‘block’ of a minimum of 5 flash stories and not more than 10, depending on the word count. For more information, visit the Guidelines page. ** Steve Berman will be reading short fiction featuring gay male protagonists and themes for the forthcoming Best Gay Short Stories: 2007 anthology from Lethe Press. All stories must have been published in the 2007 calendar year. Stories need not have released in-print; on-line publications are acceptable. No work longer than novelette (17,500 words). Work should be submitted to: Steve Berman, 118 Heritage Avenue, Maple Shade, NJ 08052. Deadline is January 31, 2008. The final selection of stories will be made in March 2008. Release is slated to coincide with the Saints & Sinners conference in New Orleans in May of 2008. ** Les Wright is seeking essays, memoir, fiction, and poetry for HIV+ 25 Years: Interrupted Journeys: Lessons from The Lazarus Generation. Submissions should be between 1500 and 4000 words. Deadline is September 30, 2008. Submissions can be sent to PO Box 460358, San Francisco, CA 94114. For more information, e-mail Les Wright at leskwright@thinkingbear.com.

Passages: Jane Rule died November 27, 2007, from complications from liver cancer at her home on Galiano Island, British Columbia. She was 76. Rule, American by birth and Canadian by choice, was the author of a numerous books, including the novels Desert of the Heart, This is not for You, and Memory Board, and the non-fiction essays Lesbian Images. Born in New Jersey on March 28, 1931 Jane Vance Rule graduated from Mills College in Oakland, California in 1952. She studied briefly in a writing program at Stanford before accepting a teaching position at Concord Academy in Massachusetts. There she met Helen Sonthoff, another teacher, who would become her lifelong partner. Eventually both women held positions at the University of British Columbia until 1976 when they moved to Galiano Island. Sonthoff died in 2000 and Rule wrote a painfully beautiful meditation on grief that appeared in Go Big. In the last several years small, independent presses like Insomniac Press in Toronto, Little Sister's and Arsenal Pulp in Vancouver have reissued Rule’s fiction. Her last project was a small book of new essays for Hedgerow Press, a small quality press on Vancouver Island, scheduled for release in 2008. Rule was inducted into the Order of Canada in July 2007. For further biographical information, the Canadian publication Xtra has a detailed tribute by Marilyn Schuster and samples of Rule’s writings.

November Publishing Notes

The buzz: The comment heard ‘round the world comes courtesy this month of author J.K. Rowling. During a Q&A session for fans in New York City at Carnegie Hall, the author of the beloved Harry Potter books revealed that Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore was gay. Sneaking under the radar this month was the comment by Potter film star Daniel Radcliffe that he wants to follow in actor Rupert Everett’s footsteps and play a gay spy in the remake of Another Country. Little Ashes, a new UK-Spanish film, will depict the love affair between Salvador Dali, the eccentric master of the avant-garde, and his fellow Spaniard Federico Garcia Lorca, the doomed dramatist and poet. The cable TV channel Here! has ramped up its original programming efforts. Two new fresh cases of the Donald Strachey mystery movie franchise starring Chad Allen are in the works. The company will also film House of Usher, the second planned installment in a series of 12 movies based on Edgar Allen Poe tales. The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis will premier a new play by Tony Kushner, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialist with a Key to the Scriptures, in 2009. In a recent issue of Venus, Charlene Cothran, the editor and publisher the publication for black lesbians, announced that she had gone straight. The 700 Club ran a profile on Cothran in June titled “A Lesbian’s Deliverance.” Over 85 deaf and hearing people share their stories in Eyes of Desire 2: A Deaf GLBT Reader, a new anthology edited by Raymond Luczak, published by Handtype Press, and a follow up to Luczak’s popular 1993 anthology. Luczak is also the publisher of the new anthology. The new press showcases literature and art created by signers, Deaf and hearing alike. Author Michael Travis Jasper turned to his local tattoo artist to design the cover for his new novel, To Be Chosen. Persona Press/Nikos Diaman Limited Editions recently published The City, a new novel by N.A. Diaman, and Following My Heart, a memoir. Gotham will publish Isaac Mizrahi’s How to Have Style, an illustrated guide to looking fabulous for all occasions. The Oscar Wilde Bookshop in New York City will celebrate its 40th birthday on November 27. A new GLBT bookstore has opened in Royal Oak, MI, Five15 Media, Mojo & More. The Gittings-Lahusen gay and lesbian book collection was donated to the Department of Special Collections and University Archives in the W.E.B. Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts. The collection contains approximately 1,000 titles dating from the late 1920s to the present day and represents a lifetime of collecting by two important gay rights activists, Barbara Gittings and her life partner, Kay Tobin Lahusen.

A few things to do this month: Contributors Stephen Greco, Sam J. Miller, Joseph Manera, Joel Nichols, and Don Shewey read from their funny and touching memoirs and stories about two vital obsessions—books and sex at a group reading for Sex by the Book: Gay Men's Tales of Lit and Lust, Thursday, November 15th @ 7pm at The Center, 208 W 13th St, New York, NY - (212) 620-7310. ** The Publishing Triangle sponsors Publishing 102: How to Market Your Book. Learn how to market and promote your book as a panel of publishing professionals explain the ABCs of book buzz and take your questions. A panel discussion featuring Mark Nichols, Marketing Director for the American Booksellers Association's Book Sense program; Colleen Lindsay, publicity and marketing manager for Doubleday Books, an imprint of Random House; and Felicia Luna Lemus, author of the novels Like Son and Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties. The panel will be moderated by Brent Gallenberger, senior marketing manager for trade books at Rodale. Thursday, November 15 at 8:00 p.nm. at The Center, 208 West 13th Street. Admission: $7 for Publishing Triangle members, $10 for nonmembers.

Where to spend some money: Saints and Sinners will hold their sixth annual literary festival May 8-11, 2008 in New Orleans. Organizers are seeking help in achieving a goal of raising $20,000 between now and December 31, 2007. Saints and Sinners is completely organized by unpaid volunteers. The fundraising goal would allow organizers to hire a much-needed, part-time office assistant to help with the pre-conference administrative work, and pay for general operating expenses to produce the event—venue rental, printing, advertising, etc. Donations would also go towards providing registration scholarships for individuals who otherwise might not be able to afford to register for the event. To help ensure the festival continues and grows, an “Archangel Membership Program” has been started. Details can be found on the Web site: www.sasfest.org. Donations may be mailed to: Saints and Sinners Literary Festival, Attention: Paul Willis, 938 Lafayette Street, #514, New Orleans, LA 70113.

Kudos: Joe Keenan was awarded this year’s Thurber Prize for humor for his novel My Lucky Star. Arch Brown’s GLBT Thorny Theater in Palm Springs received 20 nominations from the The Desert Theater League, including Outstanding Production of a Drama for The Shape Shifter and Anna Livia, Lucky in her Bridges. Pariah, a short film by Dee Rees, about a lesbian teenager, won the ₤25000 Iris Prize as the best entry of the three-day film festival in Cardiff, Wales. The film also won the NewFest festival award in New York earlier this year. Harper Lee is being awarded America's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, for her outstanding contribution to literature. Her only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and is ranked by the Guinness Book of World Records as the top selling novel of all time. The novel has sold more than 30 million copies. This year’s San Francisco Litquake festival opened up with the first Barbary Coast Award for a Lifetime of Literary Achievement presented to Armistead Maupin. Actress Laura Linney, who was in the 1994 PBS series of Maupin’s 1976 novel Tales of the City was on hand to give Maupin the award. Litquake has grown from a one-day event in the bandstand at Golden Gate Park to a weeklong festival with 354 authors in 58 venues throughout the city, at Kepler’s in Silicon Valley and Book Passage in Marin County.

And the Nominees Are: The Publishing Triangle is now accepting nominations for its 2008 fiction, nonfiction, and poetry awards, given for books published between January 1 and December 31, 2007. Each year, the organization presents six awards to lesbian and gay authors: The Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement; the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction; the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction; the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry; the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry; and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. Two additional awards, the Ferro-Grumley Awards for Lesbian and Gay Fiction, are presented at the same awards ceremony under the aegis of the Ferro-Grumley Literary Awards Inc. All of these literary prizes include honorariums: $3,000 for the Whitehead Award; $1,000 each for fiction and nonfiction; and $500 each for poetry. The deadline for nominations is December 3, 2007. Visit http://www.publishingtriangle.org/ for instructions and to download a nomination form. The awards themselves will be presented in a gala ceremony at the New School in Greenwich Village on April 28, 2008.

Open Calls: My Gender Cookbook, a gender and cooking anthology, seeks submissions of creative nonfiction essays and recipes that explore how gender and sexual identities affect our cooking choices: how we eat, what we eat, and with whom we eat. Essay submissions will not be considered without a recipe and should be between 500 and 3000 words. Please include a brief bio, e-mail contact info and your essay and recipe as word document attachments. Only previously unpublished materials will be considered. Submissions will be accepted no later than February 1st 2008. Please send submissions to mygendercookbook@gmail.com. ** Dark Scribe Press is seeking short story submissions for Unspeakable Horror, an anthology of queer horror tales. E-mail queries only. Queries can be emailed to publisher@darkscribepress.com and will be accepted through May 15, 2008. Response time to queries is 30-60 days. Once a query is greenlighted, the deadline for actual submissions is June 30, 2008. Response time to submissions is 30-60 days. Please put Query/Anthology in the subject line of all e-mails. Kindly note that queries with attachments will be deleted – do not send your story until you have queried first. The anthology is slated for fourth quarter 2008 publication. ** The Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in association with the Marigny Theatre Corporation and the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival is sponsoring their second annual playwright’s contest. The winning play will be produced by the Marigny Theatre Corporation and will premier the weekend of the 6th annual Saints and Sinners Literary Event, May 8-11, 2008. There is a $10 fee for every play submitted. Participants can enter more then once. In addition to a full production at the Festival, the winning playwright will receive a $500 cash prize and an “All-Access” Pass to the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival. Deadline for Submission is December 31, 2007. Visit the Saints and Sinners Web site for more details. ** Brad Nichols is looking for submissions for Island Boys, Tropical Gay Erotica. Length should be 2500-4000 words. Deadline is December 1, 2007. Submit original stories to alysonanthology@planetoutinc.com. Simone Thorne is editing Island Girls, Tropical Lesbian Erotica. Length should be 2500-4000 words. Deadline is December 1, 2007. Submit original stories to alysonanthology@planetoutinc.com. ** Sassafras Lowrey is editing Kicked out, an anthology which chronicles the experiences of former queer youth and current queer youth who were forced to leave home as minors because of their sexuality and/or gender identity. Submissions should be between 1,500 and 2,500 words in length and previously unpublished. Submit your piece via e-mail in .doc format to KickedOutAnthology@gmail.com. Multiple submissions per contributor are welcome. Deadline is March 1, 2008. More information can be found at: http://www.myspace.com/kickedoutanthology ** Richard Labonté and Lawrence Schimel are seeking submissions for Second Person Queer: How We Lived Our Lives – and How You Can Live Yours. Essays should be between 1,000-2,000 words and written in the second person (addressed to a "you"). Submissions can be sent to secondpersonqueer@gmail.com. Deadline is March 15, 2008. ** Notisha Massaquoi & Selly Thiam are seeking submissions for None-on-Record: Stories of Queer Africa. QLGBT Africans are invited to submit original, unpublished essays, poems, short stories, plays, creative non-fiction, and visual art. Submissions can be sent to NORsubmission@gmail.com. Deadline is March 31, 2008. More details can be found at www.myspace.com/noneonrecord.

Passages: Herbert Muschamp, the architecture critic for The New York Times from 1992 to 2004, died of lung cancer on October 3, 2007. One of the most influential critics of his generation, he frequently wrote about the central role played by gay men in New York's cultural history. ** Downtown icon and gay performing artist Dean Johnson died September 20, 2007. The six-foot-six promoter and poet was found dead in Washington, D.C. Johnson, 45, founded the weekly party Rock and Roll Fag Bar in the late eighties, and also started HomoCorps, a monthly gay music showcase at CBGB. At times a porn star and at other times a rock star (he fronted Dean and the Weenies and later the Velvet Mafia), he was always recognizable by his height (often augmented by heels) and brazen eyewear. Friends gathered in October at Rapture Café and Books in the East Village to remember a man who was rarely forgotten.

October Publishing Notes

The buzz: Rosie O’Donohue has made a few more headlines by deciding not to do any interviews to promote her new book Celebrity Detox. Jonathan Plummer, the man who helped author Terry McMillian find her grove and then announced his own, has had his tell-all novel, Balancing Act, banned from an Oakland, California bookstore. The new season of Project Runway, beginning in November, has four openly gay designers in the cast, one who is HIV-positive and penning his memoirs. Dale Peck’s new novel Body Surfing, a dark literary thriller about a race of demons who possess their prey, moving from body to body via sexual release, and the female hunter bent on destroying them, will be published by Atria. Pecan Grove Press has just published playwright David Brendan Hopes’ book of poetry, A Dream of Adonis. Author Dale Lazarov and illustrator Delic Van Loond have launched Fancy, a fantasy adult Web comic at Adultwebcomics.com. The Hourglass Group and New York Theater Workshop is presenting The Beebo Brinker Chronicles, adapted from the 1950s lesbian pulp novels by Ann Bannon. The production runs through October 20th in New York City at The Fourth Street Theater. San Francisco’s Theater Rhinoceros, the nation’s “longest-running professional queer theater company,” is celebrating its thirtieth season this year. The Menier Chocolate Factory Theater in London plans to revive the musical La Cage au Folles as its Christmas show. Sean Penn and Matt Damon are both attached to Gus Van Sant’s film of Harvey Milk, based on Randy Shilt’s book The Mayor of Castro Street.

Cleveland Just Got a Lot Cooler: Greg Wharton and Ian Philips, the fearless duo behind the Suspect Thoughts Press and Web site, have left the Bay Area behind and relocated to Cleveland, Ohio, where this month they are opening a bookstore at 4903 Clark Avenue. Suspect Thoughts Books will carry books from Suspect Thoughts Press as well as those from other independent and small presses. The new store will be open from 11 am to 7 pm Wednesdays through Sundays and a companion on-line bookstore has also been launched at http://www.alternaqueerbooks.com/. Greg and Ian have also launched a new editorial service to help queer writers, Leonard & Virginia Editorial. More details can be found at http://www.leonardandvirginia.com/.

Kudos: Ed Radtke’s The Speed of Life, a coming-of-age story about a group of youths who steal video cameras and make a film from the pilfered tapes, won the first Queer Lion Award from the Venice Film Festival.

And the Nominees Are: Nominations are now being accepted for the 20th Annual Lambda Literary Awards for books published during 2007. New guidelines and a nomination form are available at the Lammy Web site: http://www.lambdaliterary.org/. Deadline is December 1, 2007. The winners will be announced Thursday May 29 in West Hollywood.

Open Calls: Blair Mastbaum and Will Fabro are looking for submission for Cool Thing: Fiction by Gay Writers Under 30 to be published by Running Press in the Fall of 2008. Word limit is 10,000 words. Deadline is November 1, 2007. Send Word documents to: fictionanthology@gmail.com. ** White Crane Books is seeking essays and short fiction for Idol Thoughts: Gay Men and Their Heroes, an anthology to be edited by Bo Young and Steve Berman. Essays should be between 500-1,500 words in length. Fiction submitted should be between 1,000-3,500 words in length. Submissions can be emailed to sberman8@yahoo.com. Deadline is February 1, 2008. ** Rebel Satori Press is seeking poetry and prose for Madder Love: Queer Men and the Precincts of Surrealism. Deadline is October 31, 2007. Send submissions to: Peter Dubé, PO Box 643, Succ. Place du Parc, Montreal, Quebec H2X 4A6, Canada. ** Eric Summers is looking for submissions for Ride Me Cowboy: Erotic Tales of the West to be published by Starbooks Press. Deadline is February 15, 2008. For more details e-mail eric@starbookspress.com. Shane Allison is looking for stories for Fire Men: Hot Gay Erotic to be published by Cleis Press. Stories should be between 2,000 and 4,000 words. Deadline is February 1, 2008. For more details e-mail sdallison01@hotmail.com. The British queer literary journal Chroma is sponsoring its second International Queer Writing Competition in Poetry, Short Story, and Transfabulous categories. Deadline is September 1, 2008. For more details visit the Chroma Web site. ** Chroma is also sponsoring its first Queer Writing Residential in association with the Arvon Foundation to be held February 25 to March 1 in Devon, England. The course will be tutored by Betsy Warland and Thomas Glave and is devised to suit poets, prose-writers, and those interested in cross-genre writing. There are fourteen subsidised places. Course fees for the week will be £290 (which includes tuition, accommodation and food). For more details, see the Chroma Web site and newsletter. ** A contest called The Open Door Project, a five-day publishing introduction in New York City, is open to gay men writing fiction with queer content who have not yet published a book of fiction. Accommodations and transportation will be provided to an out of town winner. The judges include Christopher Bram, Alexander Chee, Samuel R. Delany, Dennis Cooper, Robert Gluck, E. Lynn Harris, Scott Heim, Andrew Holleran, David Leavitt, Stephen McCauley, Dale Peck, and John Weir. Submit stories or stand-alone novel excerpts of up to 8,000 words by March 1, 2008. Submissions can be mailed to: Don Weise, Open Door Project, c/o Oscar Wilde Bookshop, 15 Christopher St, New York, NY 10014. Queries can be sent to dweised@aol.com. ** The Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation Writing Competition for the Foundation’s 2007 writing grants will be for Short Stories, One-act Plays or short film or video projects. All works must present the gay and lesbian lifestyle in a positive manner and be based on, or directly inspired by, a historic person or event. All works must be unpublished, original, and in English. Adaptations or translations of other works of fiction are not acceptable. All submissions must be postmarked by midnight November 30, 2007 and can be sent to: The Arch and Bruce Brown Foundation, 2500 N. Palm Canyon Drive #A4, Palm Springs, CA 92262. Visit the Web site for more details.

September Publishing Notes

The buzz: Haworth Press, the parent company of the GLBT imprint Harrington Park Press, has been purchased by Taylor & Francis, pending approval by regulatory authorities in the U.S. and Europe. According to a report from Shelf Awareness, most of the Harrington Park Press nonfiction will be published and distributed by Taylor & Francis, but all fiction titles and some trade titles will be divested to another publishing house. Publicity and advertising for the imprint’s new fiction titles have been temporarily suspended and some fiction titles in the publishing pipeline have been halted. You can find the Lambda Literary Foundation’s "In Memoriam" tribute to LGBT literary figures who died during the last 18 months now up on YouTube. And Tango Makes Three, by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson and illustrated by Henry Cole, is at the top of the American Library Association’s annual list of most challenged books by parents. The award-winning children’s book is based on the true story of two New York Zoo male penguins who raise a baby penguin. The 2008 edition of Best American Erotica will celebrate the series 15th anniversary and will also be Susie Bright’s last turn as editor. This fall, Susie will announce her new literary endeavor. Author Michael Luongo is teaching a travel writing class, the Global Traveler, this fall at NYU. Among the worthy new blogs that have been recently launched is Worth the Trip, about queer books for kids and teens. Atria will publish Thom Filicia Style: Inspired Ideas for Creating Rooms You’ll Love. The cast of Rikki Beadle-Blair’s play Stonewall, about the 1969 Stonewall riots, was nominated for a best ensemble award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Mike Jones, who authored the memoir I Had To Say Something, about his tryst with Ted Haggard, appeared in Porridge, a new play by Brian Bauman at the Boulder International Fringe Festival in August. Ganymede Arts in Washington, D.C. (formerly Actors Theater of Washington) will be performing David Brendan Hope’s new play The Loves of Mr. Lincoln, in October as part of their GLBT festival. Arch Brown’s Thorny Theater in Palm Springs has announced their new season. Among the plays being offered are: News Boy by Arch Brown, Who Killed Zachary Morgan? by Harriett Weise, The Goddess Tour by Carolyn Gage, 108 Waverly by Dan Clancy and Lynn Portas, Cloud 9 by Caryl Churchill, The Bombay Trunk by Felice Picano, and Frank Lee, My Dear and Ships That Piss In the Night both by Arch Brown. And Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, two of the producing forces behind the film versions of Chicago and Hairspray, are planning to create a new television version of Peter Pan.

Scissors Uncut: Augusten Burroughs and St. Martin’s Press have agreed to change a characterization of Burroughs’s Running with Scissors in the author’s note from “memoir” to just “book,” as part of the settlement of a lawsuit filed by the Turcotte family. Burroughs will also alter the author’s note in the book to indicate: “I recognize that their memories of the events described in this book are different than my own. They are each fine, decent, and hard-working people. The book was not intended to hurt the family. Both my publisher and I regret any unintentional harm resulting from the publishing and marketing of Running with Scissors.” In a statement released by St. Martin’s Press, the publisher noted that the book could still be described as a “memoir” on the cover and elsewhere. Burroughs also said in the statement in part: “Running With Scissors is still called a memoir. It always has been a memoir, and the family expressly agreed that it will continue to be called one.... Not one word of the actual memoir itself has been changed or altered in any way. The text is exactly as I wrote it, intended it, and lived it.” He defended his work as “entirely accurate.” “I consider this [settlement] not only a personal victory but a victory for all memoirists,” Burroughs also stated. “I still maintain that the book is an entirely accurate memoir, and that it was not fictionalized or sensationalized in any way. I did not embellish or invent elements. We had a very strong case because I had the truth on my side.”

Kudos: Author Joe Keenan was named one of three finalists for the annual Thurber Prize for American Humor for his novel My Lucky Star. The winner will be announced in October. The Gold Crown Literary Society, a non-profit that supports authors, publishers and distributors of lesbian fiction, presented their awards at their third annual conference in Atlanta in June. Winners and photos are posted on their Web site. Nu Nu Yi, an author from Myanmar who writes under the name Inwa, was nominated along with 22 other authors from around Asia for the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize, for her novel about a gay spirit medium, Smile as they bow; Laugh as they bow.

Open Calls: Editors Lawrence Schimel and Linda Alvarez are accepting submissions for the 2008 editions Best Gay Poetry and Best Lesbian Poetry, to be published by A Midsummer Night’s Press. Poems can have appeared in print or online magazines, journals, or anthologies first published in 2007; or from books or chapbooks first published in 2007, even if the poem was originally published previously in periodicals, so long as the poet has the right to reprint the poem. Submissions from individual poets or queries should be sent by e-mail in .doc format to one of the following addresses, as appropriate: BestGayPoetry@gmail.com or BestLesbianPoetry@gmail.com. Please title documents with the poet’s surname. Include contact information (both street and email address), bio, and previous publication history within the document, as documents will be read separately from the e-mails. Deadline is December 1, 2007. Books and journals for review can be sent to the attention of the appropriate editor at: A Midsummer Night’s Press, 16 West 36th Street, 2nd Floor, New York NY 10018. ** Editors Connie Griffin and David Hooks are seeking nonfiction for Coming Out in the South. Deadline is February 15, 2008. Submission guidelines can be found at http://www.comingoutinthesouth.com/. ** Editor Nicole Foster is looking for lesbian erotica for Wetter, to be published by Alyson in 2008. Submissions can be sent to alysonanthology@planetoutinc.com along with name and pseudonym, as well as contact info and a short bio. In the subject line, add the name of the anthology for which your story is intended. Deadline: Sept 15, 2007.

August Publishing Notes

The buzz: Producers of the hit Australian stage version of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, in Sydney, are now eying productions for London and Broadway. The band Blondie is contributing songs to a British stage musical based on the 1985 movie Desperately Seeking Susan. PlanetOut, Inc., parent company of Out, The Advocate, and Alyson publishers, announced it was reducing the company’s workforce by fifteen percent. Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish John Waters’ “memoir-in-homage,” Role Models, a self-portrait told through profiles of his favorite personalities, from Miss Esther, owner of the scariest bar in Baltimore to Marguerite Duras, atheist leader Madalyn Murray O’Hair to insane martyr Saint Catherine of Siena, English novelist Denton Welch to singer Johnny Mathis, all of whom helped the author/director form his own brand of neurotic happiness. Author Greg Herren was elected to the board of directors for the National Stonewall Democrats. Greg Wharton and Ian Philips, the forces behind Suspect Thoughts Press, are being evicted from their Bay Area home, and are holding four “literary salon” fundraisers in August to help with relocation costs. Readers include Michelle Tea, Simon Sheppard, Patrick Califia, Kirk Read, Kevin Killian, Justin Chin, Thea Hillman, and others. Contact Greg at gregw@suspectthoughts.com for locations and details on donations.

Kudos: Jane Rule, author of the novel, Desert of the Heart, was appointed to the Order of Canada, the country’s highest civilian honor, in recognition of her lifetime contribution to literature. Her novel was made into an award-winning film, Desert Hearts, starring Helen Shaver, in 1985. The Queer Foundation has announced their Queer Scholars for 2007-08. They are: Zachary Harrington, St.John’s College, for his essay, “Fairy Tales,” and Michael O’Brien, Temple University, for his essay: “Lepidoptera.”

Open Calls: Editor Paul J. Willis is looking for essays for Sex and the Serodivide: Personal Essays of Intimacy Between Men. For more information, contact pjwillisnola@aol.com. ** Richard Labonté is looking for submissions for Best Gay Bondage 2008, published by Cleis Press. Deadline is September 15, 2007. Submissions or queries to can be sent to BestGayBondage@gmail.com. ** Simon Sheppard is looking for leatherman erotica for Leatherman, another anthology to be published by Cleis Press. Deadline is October 15, 2007. For more details visit http://www.simonsheppard.com/leatherman.html or e-mail leatherman@simonsheppard.com. ** GAYFEST NYC (Bruce Robert Harris and Jack W. Batman, producers) is now accepting submissions for its Second Annual Festival of New Plays and Musicals to be presented in New York City, May 15 - June 15, 2008. A minimum of three new works (plays or musicals) will be selected for fully-produced Main Stage productions with Actors’ Equity Association casts and professional directors and staff personnel. Additional new works will be chosen for presentation in the Festival’s Studio Reading series. Log onto the web site at http://www.gayfestnyc.com/ for more information and to read about last year’s Festival. Deadline for submissions is September 30, 2007. ** Suspect Thoughts Press is sponsoring another Project: QueerLit contest. The contest is open to any unpublished author of an English-language novel with queer and/or bent content. Submissions will be accepted from September 1, 2007 to December 31, 2007. Visit the Project: QueerLit Web site for more details.

July Publishing Notes

The buzz: Diana Rigg will star in the London stage adaptation of Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother. Terrence McNally’s The Ritz will return to Broadway this fall with Rosie Perez and Kevin Chamberlain. Faith Prince, Tom Wopat, and Harvey Fierstein will star in A Catered Affair, a new musical by Fierstein and composer John Bucchino planned for Broadway next spring, based on a teleplay by Paddy Chayefsky and a 1956 movie. Towleroad reported that Gore Vidal is unhappy with the characters in Edmund White’s new play Terre Haute, which is said to be based on an imagined series of conversations between Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and Vidal. Gus Van Sant is attached to the film version of Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Test. Jim Carrey will play a Texas convict who falls in love with his cellmate in the comedy I Love You Phillip Morris, based on the book by Steve McVicker. Rosie O’Donnell promised the folks at the recent BookExpo that her new book, Celebrity Detox, out this fall, will not be vindictive or mean-spirited. Rita Mae Brown's next three books in the Mrs. Murphy mystery series are forthcoming from Bantam Dell. Oprah’s new book club pick is Jeffrey Eugenides 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Middlesex, the story of a Greek-American girl who becomes boy. Frontiers in Los Angeles launched Summer Book, a citywide reading program for gay L.A, selecting Christopher Rice’s Light Before Day as the first read. Mayor Gavin Newson proclaimed June 12, 2007 as “Michael Tolliver Day” in San Francisco in honor of Michael “Mouse” Tolliver, one of the main characters of Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series and the narrator of Maupin’s new book, Michael Tolliver Lives. Former London police officer Brian Paddick has signed a six-figure deal with Simon & Schuster to publish his memoir. Author Perry Brass has released a new novel, Carnal Sacraments. Dale Peck’s new novel, The Garden of Lost and Found, about a young Midwesterner who moves to New York on the eve of 9/11, has been withdrawn at the request of the author and agent from the Carroll & Graf fall list due to the reorganization of new owner Perseus Book Group. A New York civil court jury found writer Laura Albert, who created the alter-ego JT Leroy, acted fraudulently and ordered her to pay $116,500 to Antidote International Films, which in 2003, signed an option contract with JT Leroy to make a feature film of the novel Sarah. The Oak Park Public Library, a suburban Chicago library, received a $3000 grant from the Illinois State Library, a division of the Office of the Secretary of State, enabling it to develop the country’s first transgender resource collection. Writer and editor Stephen Greco, who runs the Ferro-Grumley Foundation, has been named as executive director of Dance Theater Workshop. The Norfolk, Virginia branch of Lambda Rising bookstore closed at the end of June. Two new blogs covering the GLBT literary universe have arrived: the anonymously authored Best Gay Books, and poet Christopher Matthew Hennessy's areyououtsidethelines.blogspot.com.

Open Calls: Jeremy Halinen and Brett Ortler are editing of a new print literary magazine called Knockout and welcomes LGBT submissions. The first issue will arrive in September 2007. The editors are now reading submissions for the second issue, and request submissions of 3-6 unpublished poems, sent all in one file, as an MS Word document, to the following two email addresses: knockoutpoetry@gmail.com and jeremyhalinen@yahoo.com. Deadline is August 15, 2007. The editors are not considering unsolicited fiction or nonfiction submissions at this time.

June Publishing Notes

The buzz: Bertelsmann, which recently acquired Bookspan, is overhauling the book club business. Bookspan will close eight book clubs, including the popular GLBT Insightout Books. Former Insightout editor David Rosen is now Editor-in-Chief at a soon-to-be-launched Progressive Book Club, which hopes to continue ISO’s queer literary outreach. Perseus Books Group, which recently acquired Avalon Publishing Group, is eliminating the Avalon imprints Thunder’s Mouth and Carroll and Graf. Among the 24 positions eliminated in the downsizing was senior editor Don Weise. Winton Shoemaker & Co LLC has acquired Soft Skull Press. Beacon Press in Boston is launching Queer Action/Queer Ideas, a trade series edited by Michael Bronski. The first two books in the series will be Come Out and Win: Organizing Yourself, Your Community, and Your World by activist Sue Hyde and Out Law: What LGBT Youth Should Know about Their Legal Rights by journalist Lisa Keen. Floricanto Press is launching a new line of GLBT-themed books, with Carlos T. Mock as series editor. Up first are Papi Chulo: A Legend, A Novel, and the Puerto Rican Identity by Mock and Leo Cabranes-Grant's The Chat Room and Other Plays-a Puerto Rican Anthology. Emanuel Xavier will edit The First Modern Anthology of Latino GLBT Poetry-Mariposas for a Summer 2008 release. Winston Leyland has re-launched Gay Sunshine and Leyland Publications imprints. Lawrence Schimel has re-launched A Midsummer Night's Press. Founded in 1991, the press now publishes commercially-printed chapbooks under three imprints including Body Language: devoted to texts exploring questions of gender and sexual identity. The first title from this imprint will be a collection of poems by Lambda Literary Award-winner Achy Obejas. Toni Amato is the editor and publisher of a new literary journal, Concrete, published by Sideshow Press. Mystery writer Michael Nava, who is also an attorney, is being considered for a seat on San Francisco’s 1st District Court of Appeal. If chosen, he would become California’s first openly gay appellate justice. Edmund White’s play Terre Haute was recently performed in London. Disturbia screenwriter Christopher Landon will write the psychological thriller The Flock for Warner Independent Pictures. The movie will revolve around three teens accused of practicing witchcraft. Bryan Singer and Gus Van Sant are each eyeing separate projects about Harvey Milk. TLA has acquired the distribution rights to the upcoming film version of the hit off-Broadway musical Naked Boys Singing, headed into cinemas this fall.

Upcoming Readings: Contributors to Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys will read June 13 at A Different Light in Los Angeles, June 5th at the KGB Bar in Manhattan, June 19th at Borders Columbus Circle in Manhattan, and July 21 at Book Hampton in East Hampton. Lawrence Schimel will read from Fairy Tales for Writers June 3rd at Bluestockings Bookstore in New York City and will celebrate the release of The Mammoth Book of New Gay Erotica June 6th in Manhattan with Will Clark Presents Porno Bingo!

Kudos: Winners of the Arch and Bruce Brown Awards in Full-length fiction are: First Prize: Myrlin A. Hermes of Portland, Oregon for The Lunatic, the Lover and the Poet. Second Place Award: Joy Shayne Laughter of Seattle, Washington for Yu and Dick Wagenaar of Newburgh, New York for Koryo. Third Place Award: M.M. DeVoe of New York, New York for Burn in Our Hearts. Moises Kaufman received the Immigration Equality’s Global Vision Award at the Safe Havens Awards in New York City, which is produced as a means to increase awareness of immigration issues for gay families. Among this year’s recipients of fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts were Clifford Chase and Aaron Smith.

Publishing Triangle Awards: Andrew Holleran received the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement at the Publishing Triangle’s annual awards ceremony in New York City. Justin Chin, author of Gutted, won the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. Jennifer Rose, author of Hometown for an Hour, won the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home, won the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction. Kenji Yoshino, author Covering, won the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction. Martin Hyatt, author of A Scarecrow's Bible, won the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. Nancy Bereano won a special Leadership award in recognition of her long and distinguished service to GLBT literature, especially while the head of Firebrand Books. Lisa Carey, author of Every Visible Thing, won the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction. Christopher Bram, author of Exiles in America, won the Ferro-Grumley Award for Gay Fiction. The Robert Chesley Foundation Award for playwriting was shared by Eric Bentley (Lifetime Achievement Award) and Chris Weikel (Emerging Artist).

Lambda Literary Awards: The Lambda Literary Awards were presented May 31, 2007 in Manhattan. The winners are: Anthology: Love, Bourbon Street, edited by Greg Herren & Paul J. Willis. Arts & Culture: GAY L.A. by Lillian Faderman & Stuart Timmons. Bisexual: The Bisexual's Guide to the Universe by Nicole Kristal & Michael Szymanski. Children’s/Young Adult (tie): Full Spectrum, edited by David Levithan & Billy Merrell and Between Mom & Jo by Julie Anne Peters. Drama/Theater: 1001 Beds by Tim Miller. Humor: My Lucky Star by Joe Keenan. LGBT Nonfiction (tie): GAY L.A. by Lillian Faderman & Stuart Timmons and Different Daughters by Marcia M. Gallo. LGBT Studies: Their Own Receive Them Not by Horace L. Griffin. Sci-fi/Fantasy/Horror: Izzy and Eve by Neal Drinnan. Spirituality: The After-Death Room by Michael McColly. Transgender: The Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Susan Stryker & Stephen Whittle. Lesbian Fiction: The Night Watch by Sarah Waters. Lesbian Romance: Fresh Tracks by Georgia Beers. Lesbian Mystery: The Art of Detection by Laurie R. King. Lesbian Poetry: Lemon Hound by Sina Queyras. Lesbian Memoir/Biography: Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. Lesbian Erotica: Walk Like a Man by Laurinda D. Brown. Lesbian Debut Fiction: The Teahouse Fire by Ellis Avery. Gay Fiction: Suspension by Robert Westfield. Gay Romance: When the Stars Come Out by Rob Byrnes. Gay Mystery: The Lucky Elephant Restaurant by Garry Ryan. Gay Poetry: A History of My Tattoo by Jim Elledge. Gay Memoir/Biography: The Bill From My Father by Bernard Cooper. Gay Erotica: A History of Barbed Wire by Jeff Mann. Gay Debut Fiction: Suspension by Robert Westfield.

Passages: Terry Ryan, author of the memoir The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, later turned into a movie starring Julianne Moore, about how her mother kept the family financially afloat by winning jingle contests, died May 16, 2007, of cancer. She was 61. Ryan was the sixth of ten children. She was born on July 14, 1946, in Defiance, Ohio. Growing up in the middle, with five brothers, she earned the nickname “Tuff.” In the late ‘60s, she earned her bachelor’s degree from Bowling Green State University in Ohio and moved to Chicago and later to San Francisco. She worked there as a writer and cartoonist and also reviewed books and wrote poetry. She wrote her mother’s life story after her death at the age of 85 in 1998. She is survived by editor Pat Holt, her partner of nearly a quarter century, and five brothers and four sisters.

May Publishing Notes

The buzz: Disabled author Peggy Munson’s omission from the Lambda Literary Awards reading in San Francisco created a wave of e-mails, blogs, accusations, apologies, and articles, with Heather Cassell of the Bay Area Reporter filing a recent article in the weekly paper. Munson, the author of the novel Origami Striptease, nominated in the Lesbian Debut Fiction category, had been scheduled to appear via DVD w