November Publishing Notes

The buzz: Angela Lansbury will be returning to Broadway co-starring with Marian Seldes in Terrence McNally’s new play Deuce, scheduled for a May 6th, 2007 opening at the Music Box Theatre. The New York Theatre Workshop will premiere All That I Will Ever Be, a new play by Alan Ball (Six Feet Under, American Beauty) in January 2007. Arch Brown’s new GLBT Thorny Theater in Palm Springs has announced its first season. Plays up include: Cloud 9 by Caryl Churchill; Kitchen Duty by Victor Bumbalo; Anna Livia, Lucky in her Bridges by David Brendan Hopes; The Shape Shifter by R.L. Nesvet; DoubleTalk by Arch Brown; and Stray Dog Story by Robert Chesley. Freida Lee Mock’s Wrestling with Angels, the new documentary on Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Kushner (Angels in America), opens nationwide in November and December. Playwright Del Shores was honored with the 276th star on the Palm Springs Walk of Stars in October. Rupert Everett is reportedly developing a film about the final three years of Oscar Wilde’s life. Variety reported that Tori Spelling will star in Kiss the Bride, a romantic comedy about a gay man who tries to stop his former lover from marrying a woman. Taiwanese director Leste Chen’s gay love story, Eternal Summer, garnered four nominations in the 43rd Golden Horse Awards, the Chinese speaking world’s Oscars. BBC Video has released the DVD of the three-part adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst’s Booker Prize-winning novel, The Line of Beauty. The Boston Globe reported that the Northhampton, Massachusetts family that is suing author Augusten Burroughs and St. Martin’s Press over Running With Scissors reached a settlement with Sony Pictures, averting a second lawsuit over the movie based on the book. Michael Holloway Perrone has sold Italian language rights to his novel A Time Before Me. The University of California Press will publish Ronnie Gilbert: A Radical Life with Songs, touching on the performer’s early years with Pete Seeger and The Weavers. Harper will publish Josh Kilmer-Purcell’s first novel Candy Everybody Wants, about a small town boy who makes it big. Dial Press will publish Patrick Ryan’s untitled novel, about how a father’s criminal activities sends his family on the lam and into faith healing. Cecilia Tan and Circlet Press are planning to launch an erotic podcast and a new web site and blog. The Press is also planning a November 4 fundraiser in Cambridge, MA. Among the authors lined up for the fifth Saints and Sinners Festival weekend in New Orleans May 11-13, 2007 are Dorothy Allison, Nancy Garden, and Clive Barker. The Lambda Literary Awards are initiating a new category for Bisexual books beginning with their 2007 awards. The awards will be May 31, 2007 at the Katie Murphy Amphitheater at FIT in New York City. Jim Provenzano is the new assistant arts editor at the Bay Area Reporter. Provenzano, who has written the column “Sports Complex” for the paper, is also the author of the novels Pins and Monkey Suits. Don Hoffman, editor and co-owner of the website Queer Life News, has resigned to pursue a book deal with a major educational publisher. Mattilda aka Matt Bernstein Sycamore is now blogging at http:nobodypasses.blogspot.com. Author Dale Lazarov and illustrator Steve MacIsaac have created a gay erotic comic book titled Sticky, published by Bruno Gmunder Verlag. Bruno Gmunder Verlag will also publish an upcoming collection of photographs by Jack Slomovits titled Sex Life NYC.

A Few Things to Do This Month: Bestselling author Patricia Nell Warren (The Front Runner) talks with Cyd Zeigler Jr., president of OutSports.com, Wednesday November 8th from 6:00 to 8:30 p.m. at LGBT Community Center, 208 West 13th Street. Warren's new work, The Lavender Locker Room, profiles such figures as jockey John Damien, golfer Babe Didriksen, pilot Amelia Earhart, and downhill skier Erik Schinegger. Admission: $6 for Publishing Triangle or other host group members, $10 for nonmembers. The Publishing Triangle will also host: Publishing 102: How to Market Your Book on Thursday, November 16, 8:00 p.m. at the LGBT Community Center, 208 West 13th Street. Admission: $7 for Publishing Triangle members, $10 for nonmembers. On display at the new Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation in Soho is the erotic art of Bloomsbury artist Duncan Grant titled “Ivory & Ebony” from November 7th to December 16th.

Kudos: The winners of the International Queer Writing Competition sponsored by the UK literary magazine Chroma are: The Transfabulous Prize: Brynn Binnell for “Spawn of the Regime,” Poetry: First place: Robert Hamberger for “Wrestling the Angel,” Second place: Chris Beckett for “The Haggis Story,” and Third place: Dh. Maitreyabandhu for “Birches.” Short Stories: First place: P O'Loughlin for “Two Tickets for the Musical,” Second place: Char March for “The Memory of Showers,” and Third place: Brynn Binnell for “Spawn of the Regime” and Helena Lukowska for “Eva.” The Lucille Lortel Foundation, which recently started a program to award fellowships to playwrights every two years, announced the first eight recipients. Among them are David Greenspan and Lisa Kron, each receiving $50,000. The winners were selected by a seven-member panel that included the playwrights David Henry Hwang and Paula Vogel.

New and now: The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, in collaboration with AsylumLaw.org has launched a new online library documenting examples of human rights abuses and violations based on sexual orientation, gender identity, or HIV status. The library, which is free to access, is meant as a resource for political asylum seekers and their advocates to gather proof of abuses in their home country. The library is available at http://www.iglhrc.org/site/iglhrc/section.php?id=20. Visitors can then view an individual country packet that contains an extensive human rights profile of that country. In addition to the 144 different country packets, there are three thematic packets that pertain to the Islamic world, lesbian issues, and transgender issues.

Open calls: The Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in association with the Marigny Theatre Corporation and the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival are sponsoring a playwrighting contest. The winning play will be produced by the Marigny Theatre Corporation and will premier the weekend of the 5th annual Saints and Sinners Literary Festival, May 11-13, 2007. There is a $10 registration fee and a December 31, 2006 deadline. For further information and details visit the Web site or e-mail sasfestnola@gmail.com. Maria Angeline is editing a new anthology, Visible: A Femmethology, for Merge Press. Essays should be between 1500-6000 words. Deadline for submissions is March 15, 2007. Contact is maria.angeline@mergepress.com. Zane is seeking submissions for Purple Panties for Strebor Books/Simon and Schuster. Stories must prominently feature lesbian activities with African-Americans in one or more of the key roles. Stories should be between 2,500-3,500 in length . Deadline for submissions is April 1, 2007. Send submissions to: Strebor Books/Simon and Schuster, ATTN: PP, PO Box 6505, Largo, MD 20792. The Publishing Triangle is now accepting nominations for its 2007 fiction, nonfiction, and poetry awards, given for books published between January 1 and December 31, 2006. Visit the Web site for details and nomination forms. Nominations for the 19th Annual Lambda Literary Awards will be accepted between September 1, 2006 and December 1, 2006. Check the guidelines on the Foundation Web site or contact asklambda@earthlink.net. All nominations must be postmarked by December 1, 2006.

Passages: Aleta Fenceroy, one half of the Fenceberry news distribution team, has died of cancer. She was 57. Along with her partner Jean Mayberry the two women, as “Fenceberry,” distributed GLBT newspaper articles by e-mail from 1994 to 2004 and created an invaluable community and news service. In 2004, Aleta told the Washington Blade, “It’s been a pleasure and an honor. Nobody told us to do this. We just kind of started doing it….”