Curation: Publishing Triangle Book Awards

When I signed on to be a judge for The Publishing Triangle's Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBTQ Fiction, I frankly had only a little idea of what I was in for. I knew that I'd be reading many, many books. Then evaluating them along the way. Additionally, I expected to be sent around 50 novels and short story collections. In reality, the total was well over 100. And what an assortment: a non-binary science fiction tome (Natasha Pulley's The Mars House), a savage satire (Tom Pyun's Something Close to Nothing), some trans metafiction (Alvina Chamberland's Love the World or Get Killed Trying), a contemporary queer retelling of Jesus (Anthony Oliveira's Dayspring), a transnational coming-of-age novel (Mike Fu's Masquerade), a dramedy about recent widowhood (Elisabeth Nonas' Grace Period) and more than one terrific short story collection (Marian Crotty's Near Strangers, Lauren Cook's Sex Goblin, and Zoe Whittall's Wild Failure) . As far as getting a sense of the state of queer literature circa 2024, I definitely got a crash course. And if none of these aforementioned books made the final five nominees, they easily could have. Awards are partly about consensus so you generally have to appeal to multiple people and the readers change every year. Overall, I'm pleased with the finalists, however, which include Jiaming Tang's Cinema Love, Anne Fleming's Curiosities, Kazim Ali's Indian Winter, Gary Zebrun's Hart Island, and Ruben Reyes Jr.'s There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven. As a big fan of namesake Robert Ferro's novels (The Family of Max Desir, The Blue Star, Second Son), I hope he too would approve.