Edmund Valentine White III is a gay American novelist, memoirist, playwright, biographer and essayist. He is the recipient of Lambda Literary's Visionary Award, the National Book Foundation's Lifetime Achievement Award, and the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction. France made him Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1993.
Rigoberto González is an American writer and book critic. He is an editor and author of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and bilingual children's books, and self-identifies in his writing as a gay Chicano. His most recent project is Latino Poetry, a Library of America anthology, which gathers verse that spans from the 17th century to the present day. His memoir What Drowns the Flowers in Your Mouth: A Memoir of Brotherhood was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography. He is the 2015 recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle, the 2020 recipient of the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and the 2024 recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Review of Books.
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 & Selected Poems, received the National Book Award for Poetry.
Kim Powers is an American writer. His memoir The History of Swimming: A Memoir was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Biography, and his television writing has brought him two Emmys, a Peabody Award, and three Edward R. Murrow Awards. In 2007, Out named him one of their "Out 100," a list of the "top 100 most influential gays or lesbians in the country."
Red Hen Press is an American non-profit press located in Pasadena, California, and specializing in the publication of poetry, literary fiction, and nonfiction. The press is a member of the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, and was a finalist for the 2013 AWP Small Press Publisher Award. The press has been featured in Publishers Weekly,Kirkus Reviews, and Independent Publisher.
Patricia Lockwood is an American poet, novelist, and essayist. Beginning a career in poetry, her collections include Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, a 2014 New York Times Notable Book. Later prose works received more exposure and notoriety. She is a multiple award winner: her 2017 memoir Priestdaddy won the Thurber Prize for American Humor and her 2021 debut novel, No One Is Talking About This, won the Dylan Thomas Prize. In addition to her writing activities, she has been a contributing editor for the London Review of Books since 2019.
Danez Smith is an American poet, writer and performer from St. Paul, Minnesota. They are queer, non-binary and HIV-positive. They are the author of the poetry collections [insert] Boy and Don't Call Us Dead: Poems, both of which have received multiple awards, and Homie/My Nig. Their most recent poetry collection Bluff was published in 2024.
Hanif Abdurraqib is an American poet, essayist, and cultural critic. His first essay collection, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was published in 2017. His 2021 essay collection A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance received the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence. Abdurraqib received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2021.
Phillip B. Williams is an American poet. Born in Chicago, he is the author of the chapbooks Bruised Gospels and Burn, as well as the full length poetry collections Thief in the Interior and MUTINY.
T Kira Madden is an American writer. She is the author of a memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, and the Founding Editor-in-Chief of No Tokens Journal. In 2021, she received Lambda Literary's Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers.
How We Fight for Our Lives is a coming-of-age memoir written by American author Saeed Jones and published by Simon & Schuster in 2019. The story follows Jones as a young, Black, gay man in 1990s Lewisville, Texas as he fights to carve out a place for himself, within his family, within his country, within his own hopes, desires, and fears.
Prelude to Bruise is a 2014 poetry collection by American author Saeed Jones, published by Coffee House Press on September 9, 2014.
K-Ming Chang is an American novelist and poet. She is the author of the novel Bestiary (2020). Her short story collection 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.
George Matthew Johnson, more commonly known as George M. Johnson, is an American author, journalist, and activist. A queer African American, they are best known as the author of the memoir-manifesto All Boys Aren't Blue (2020).
Thomas Page McBee is an American transgender journalist, television writer, and amateur boxer. He was the first transgender man to box in Madison Square Garden, which he discusses in Amateur. His first book, Man Alive, won a Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction.
Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man is a nonfiction book by Thomas Page McBee, published August 14, 2018, by Scribner.
Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming a Man is a nonfiction book by Thomas Page McBee, published September 8, 2014, by City Lights Publishers. The book centres on the question "What does it really mean to be a man?" as McBee shares his negative experiences with masculinity, including childhood abuse and a mugging, both perpetrated by men.
Naomi Jackson is an American author most known for her novel The Star Side of Bird Hill, which was nominated for the NAACP Image Award. She is a Fulbright recipient, and a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Elissa Altman is an American author, essayist, editor, and teacher. She is the author of the hybrid craft-memoir, Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create, and three memoirs: Motherland: A Memoir of Love, Loathing, and Longing,Poor Man’s Feast: A Love Story of Comfort, Desire, and the Art of Simple Cooking, and Treyf: My Life as an Unorthodox Outlaw Her narrative food blog, Poor Man's Feast, won a James Beard Foundation Award for Individual Food Blog in 2012; it became the basis for her bestselling Substack newsletter of the same name in 2022.
