LGBT bibliophiles will recognize New York Review Books (NYRB) Classics as the press that could—but doesn’t—boast about its impressive catalogue of LGBT-interest titles. Edwin Frank founded the press in 1999 as the publishing house of The New York Review of Books and serves as the imprint's Editorial Director.
Frank kindly agreed to participate in an exclusive interview with the Lambda Literary Review. Read More
Tom Cardamone’s newest work of fiction, Green Thumb, is described by Publisher’s Weekly as an “imaginative post-apocalyptic novella with New Weird sensibilities.” It may be slim in size, but this novella is surely a grand, grand tale. Mr. Cardamone chatted with Lambda and revealed more about Green Thumb, his love of music, Mad Max movies, and more... Read More
"I am personally interested in exploring the possibilities of poetry—to counter rhetoric, reinvigorate language, and uplift the material of the everyday."
Jennifer Benka was recently named the new Executive Director of the Academy of American Poets. Having served as Managing Director of Poets & Writers for almost a decade and, most recently, as the National Director of Development and Marketing for 826 National, she’s also an accomplished writer in her own right.
Benka took some time to talk with Lambda Literary about the mission of the Academy of American Poets, her own personal inspirations, and the relationship between poetry and queerness. Read More
Awww romance! People like reading about adoration almost as much as they like feeling it. It’s literature’s great everlasting theme....
French-born photographer and documentarist Chantal Regnault began documenting New York City ballroom and voguing scene in the late 1980s, capturing it at its height.
Her collection, Voguing and the House Ballroom Scene of New York City 1989-92, was released this year by Soul Jazz Records. Regnault took some time to answer a few questions related to the publication.
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Sometimes a writer does not choose their subject--their subject chooses them. Such could be said about Lisa Cohen’s stunning biography All We Know, a triptych portrait of three women, all part of a lively sapphic social circle in the early 20th century.
Cohen took time to talk to with Lambda about the path of her research, the negotiation between fact and fantasy, and the great Sybille Bedford, who provided both invaluable stories and friendship. Read More
"...In Greenwich Village, we’d go dancing in lesbian bars, to raucous dyke parties heavy with pot smoke, and to poetry and music events at the women’s coffee house."
Chana Wilson and her mother were both rescued from the claustrophobic 50s by the Second-wave feminist movement of the 70s. In Wilson’s Riding Fury Home (Seal Press), she writes an inspired account of how the burgeoning revolution directly and radically changed her and her mother’s lives. Read More
"You have to decide how honest you want to be in your writing: if you want to leave it in your diary or put it in a book. Yes, the experiences are intense but you have to allow yourself to go there, to cross that line."
At the heart of Joe Brainard’s I Remember is a counter-intuitive nostalgia for unbelonging. In his long form poem-cum-memoir, Brainard shares glimpses of his childhood and early adulthood that evoke lusty contradictions—the pleasure, pain, and curiosity of growing up different in America. It is a tribute to the self that survived, and the selves lost along the way.
In the same way Shane Allison’s own version of I Remember, published in 2012 by Future Tense Books, also evokes a sense of wonder, frustration, joy and sadness. Read More
"...change is inevitable. And I think we are in for a dramatic shift now. Poetry has that ability to contribute to changing the way we think."
Poet Andrea Jenkins is the author of Pieces of a Scream and Tributaries: Poems Celebrating Black History. Recently elected to chair the newly established GLBT Caucus of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, she is also the Minneapolis Eighth Ward Senior Policy Aide in the office of Councilwoman Elizabeth Glidden.
Jenkins recently sat down with Lambda to talk about poetry, Amiri Baraka, social justice, President Obama, and much more. Read More
"I would find a story thread, follow it, see where it would lead me, often to another thread and then another and another. I did not have to make up the funny lines. My subjects provided me with the best lines..."
Christopher Bram’s newest book, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America, covers a 50-year period and deliciously fills in details on the lives of a dozen gay writers who changed the fabric of our culture.
Bram took some time to talk with Lambda Literary about his new book, the publishing industry, and the state of literary fiction. Read More
