Finalists were announced on March 19 for the Publishing Triangle Awards, celebrating LGBTQ+ fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Canadians who ranked among the finalists included Canada Reads finalist Samra Habib for We Have Always Been Here, Téa Mutonji’s debut short-story collection Shut Up You’re Pretty, and Hazel Jane Plante’s The Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian).

Four books from Vancouver’s Arsenal Pulp Press ranked among the finalists while three of the four finalists in the trans and gender-variant literature category are Canadian. Canadian finalists are highlighted in bold in the categories below. The full list of finalists is available on Publishing Triangle’s website.

The Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction

• In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado (Graywolf Press)
• Sontag: Her Life and Work, Benjamin Moser (Ecco)
• Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman (W. W. Norton)
• We Have Always Been Here, Samra Habib (Viking / Penguin Canada)

The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry

• Be Recorder, Carmen Giménez Smith (Graywolf Press)
• Odes to Lithium, Shira Erlichman (Alice James Books)
• Soft Science, Franny Choi (Alice James Books)
• Tonguebreaker, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (Arsenal Pulp Press)

The Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction

• Black Light, Kimberly King Parsons (Vintage)
• In West Mills, De’Shawn Charles Winslow (Bloomsbury)
• Lot, Bryan Washington (Riverhead)
• Shut Up You’re Pretty, Téa Mutonji (Arsenal Pulp Press)

The Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature

• Disintegrate/Dissociate, Arielle Twist (Arsenal Pulp Press)
• I Hope We Choose Love, Kai Cheng Thom (Arsenal Pulp Press)
• The Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian), Hazel Jane Plante (Metonymy Press)
• We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, 1961–1991, edited by Ellis Martin and Zach Ozma (Nightboat Books)