Lambda Literary, the nation's leading national nonprofit organization
promoting LGBTQ literature, is pleased to announce that Jeanne Thornton
and Mecca Jamilah Sullivan have been named winners of the 2018 Judith A.
Markowitz Award for Emerging LGBTQ Writers.
The Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging LGBTQ Writers recognizes LGBTQ-
identified writers whose work demonstrates their strong potential for promising careers.The judges for this year's prize were authors Cat Fitzpatrick and Manuel Muñoz who released these statements about the winners:
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| Jeanne Thornton | |
"There were two qualities that made a question Real," Jeanne Thornton
writes,"(1) she had to be earnestly concerned with the answer, and (2)
she had to feel that she was putting herself at risk by asking the
question." In its commitment not only to relevance but also to
discomfort, Thornton's work is an important contribution to contemporary
depictions of transgender sociality. Pushing beyond a focus on
representation, she produces beautifully awkward engagements with those
dynamics that cut through the "trans community", and complicate our
attempts to instantiate ourselves as coherent, let alone admirable,
people. Through her tireless work as a publisher at Instar Books and as
an editor, she has produced vital anthologies like Nerve Endings: The New Trans Erotic and We're Still Here: All-Trans Comics. Her work as a literary citizen is a keystone in the development of both queer community and trans literature.
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Mecca Jamilah Sullivan, Ph.D.
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"This is a story that matters, so listen," says one of the protagonists in Mecca Jamilah Sullivan's short-story collection Blue Talk and Love,
and it's the beautiful imperative that provides the foundation for this
artist and her steadfast belief in literature's power to "make the
lives of queer people, black people, and women more livable." An
essential writer of our present moment, she also works as an organizer
to call attention the past, asking us to recognize those artists who
helped lay the foundation for the bold questions we are asking now. At
the same time, in projects like "I Think You've Changed the World," a
database of LGBTQ writers created as a site of mutual mentoring, and
through her own work as a teacher and mentor, Sullivan demonstrates that
she has her eyes on the future, too, and the spaces we create to help
inspire the emerging artists in our midst.
The award includes a cash prize of $1000. Thornton and Sullivan will be recognized as winners of the Markowitz Award at the 30th Annual Lambda Literary Awards ceremony on June 4th in New York City.
