American literature is literature written or produced in the United States and in the colonies that preceded it. The American literary tradition is part of the broader tradition of English-language literature but also includes literature produced in languages other than English.
Lambda Literary Awards, also known as the "Lammys", are awarded yearly by Lambda Literary to recognize the crucial role LGBTQ writers play in shaping the world. The Lammys celebrate the very best in LGBTQ literature. The awards were instituted in 1989.
Dorothy Allison is an American writer from South Carolina whose writing focuses on class struggle, sexual abuse, child abuse, feminism and lesbianism. She is a self-identified lesbian femme. Allison has won a number of awards for her writing, including several Lambda Literary Awards. In 2014, Allison was elected to membership in the Fellowship of Southern Writers.
Emma Donoghue is an Irish-Canadian playwright, literary historian, novelist, and screenwriter. Her 2010 novel Room was a finalist for the Booker Prize and an international best-seller. Donoghue's 1995 novel Hood won the Stonewall Book Award and Slammerkin (2000) won the Ferro-Grumley Award for Lesbian Fiction. She is a 2011 recipient of the Alex Awards. Room was adapted by Donoghue into a film of the same name. For this, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
Philip Blake Morrison FRSL is an English poet and author who has published in a wide range of fiction and non-fiction genres. His greatest success came with the publication of his memoirs And When Did You Last See Your Father? (1993), which won the J. R. Ackerley Prize for Autobiography. He has also written a study of the murder of James Bulger, As If. Since 2003, Morrison has been Professor of Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
John R. Keene Jr. is an American writer, translator, professor, and artist who was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2018. His 2022 poetry collection, Punks: New and Selected Poems, received the National Book Award for Poetry.
Etel Adnan was a Lebanese-American poet, essayist, and visual artist. In 2003, Adnan was named "arguably the most celebrated and accomplished Arab American author writing today" by the academic journal MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.
Lesbian literature is a subgenre of literature addressing lesbian themes. It includes poetry, plays, fiction addressing lesbian characters, and non-fiction about lesbian-interest topics. A similar term is sapphic literature, encompassing works that feature love between women that are not necessarily lesbian.
Jessica Fisher is an American poet, translator, and critic. In 2012, she was awarded the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellowship in literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Robin Becker is an American poet, critic, feminist, and professor. She was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently, Tiger Heron and Domain of Perfect Affection. Her All-American Girl, won the 1996 Lambda Literary Award in Poetry. Becker earned a B.A. in 1973 and an M.A. from Boston University in 1976. She lives in Boalsburg, Pennsylvania and spends her summers in southern New Hampshire.
Samiya A. Bashir is a queer American artist, poet, and author. Much of Bashir's poetry explores the intersections of culture, change, and identity through the lens of race, gender, the body and sexuality. She is currently the June Jordan visiting professor at Columbia University of New York. Bashir is the first black woman recipient of the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature. She was also the third black woman to serve as tenured professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
Poetry Society of America's Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Student Poetry Award is given "for the best unpublished poem by a student in grades 9 through 12 from the United States. The award is endowed under the will of Louise Louis Whitbread and Ruth M. Bourne. Each winner receives a $250 prize.
Kelly Cherry was an American novelist, poet, essayist, professor, and literary critic and a former Poet Laureate of Virginia (2010–2012). She was the author of more than 30 books, including the poetry collections Songs for a Soviet Composer, Death and Transfiguration, Rising Venus and The Retreats of Thought. Her short fiction was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and New Stories from the South, and won a number of awards.
Nightboat Books is an American nonprofit literary press founded in 2004 and located in Brooklyn, New York. The press publishes poetry, fiction, essays, translations, and intergenre books.
Mary Meriam is an American poet and editor. She is a founding editor of Headmistress Press, one of the few presses in the United States specializing in lesbian poetry.
Dawn Lundy Martin is an American poet, essayist and activist. She has received the Academy of American Arts and Science's May Sarton Prize for Poetry. Martin is currently faculty at University of Pittsburgh and director of the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics. Martin received the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for her book Good Stock, Strange Blood published by Coffee House Press.
Muriel Leung is an American writer. Her work includes the poetry collection Bone Confetti, which won the 2015 Noemi Press Book Award and Imagine Us, The Swarm, which received the Nightboat’s Poetry Prize. She has received multiple writing fellowships, and her work was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Vi Khi Nao is a cross-genre writer from Long Khánh, Vietnam. She is a graduate of the MFA program at Brown University, where she received the John Hawkes Prize, the Feldman Prize and the Kim Ann Arstark Memorial Award. She was the 2022 recipient of Lambda Literary's Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists' Prize.
K-Ming Chang is an American novelist and poet. She is the author of the novel Bestiary (2020). Gods of Want won the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. In 2021, Bestiary was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Jenny Johnson is an American queer poet.
