November Publishing Notes

The buzz: The comment heard ‘round the world comes courtesy this month of author J.K. Rowling. During a Q&A session for fans in New York City at Carnegie Hall, the author of the beloved Harry Potter books revealed that Hogwarts headmaster Albus Dumbledore was gay. Sneaking under the radar this month was the comment by Potter film star Daniel Radcliffe that he wants to follow in actor Rupert Everett’s footsteps and play a gay spy in the remake of Another Country. Little Ashes, a new UK-Spanish film, will depict the love affair between Salvador Dali, the eccentric master of the avant-garde, and his fellow Spaniard Federico Garcia Lorca, the doomed dramatist and poet. The cable TV channel Here! has ramped up its original programming efforts. Two new fresh cases of the Donald Strachey mystery movie franchise starring Chad Allen are in the works. The company will also film House of Usher, the second planned installment in a series of 12 movies based on Edgar Allen Poe tales. The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis will premier a new play by Tony Kushner, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialist with a Key to the Scriptures, in 2009. In a recent issue of Venus, Charlene Cothran, the editor and publisher the publication for black lesbians, announced that she had gone straight. The 700 Club ran a profile on Cothran in June titled “A Lesbian’s Deliverance.” Over 85 deaf and hearing people share their stories in Eyes of Desire 2: A Deaf GLBT Reader, a new anthology edited by Raymond Luczak, published by Handtype Press, and a follow up to Luczak’s popular 1993 anthology. Luczak is also the publisher of the new anthology. The new press showcases literature and art created by signers, Deaf and hearing alike. Author Michael Travis Jasper turned to his local tattoo artist to design the cover for his new novel, To Be Chosen. Persona Press/Nikos Diaman Limited Editions recently published The City, a new novel by N.A. Diaman, and Following My Heart, a memoir. Gotham will publish Isaac Mizrahi’s How to Have Style, an illustrated guide to looking fabulous for all occasions. The Oscar Wilde Bookshop in New York City will celebrate its 40th birthday on November 27. A new GLBT bookstore has opened in Royal Oak, MI, Five15 Media, Mojo & More. The Gittings-Lahusen gay and lesbian book collection was donated to the Department of Special Collections and University Archives in the W.E.B. Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts. The collection contains approximately 1,000 titles dating from the late 1920s to the present day and represents a lifetime of collecting by two important gay rights activists, Barbara Gittings and her life partner, Kay Tobin Lahusen.

A few things to do this month: Contributors Stephen Greco, Sam J. Miller, Joseph Manera, Joel Nichols, and Don Shewey read from their funny and touching memoirs and stories about two vital obsessions—books and sex at a group reading for Sex by the Book: Gay Men's Tales of Lit and Lust, Thursday, November 15th @ 7pm at The Center, 208 W 13th St, New York, NY - (212) 620-7310. ** The Publishing Triangle sponsors Publishing 102: How to Market Your Book. Learn how to market and promote your book as a panel of publishing professionals explain the ABCs of book buzz and take your questions. A panel discussion featuring Mark Nichols, Marketing Director for the American Booksellers Association's Book Sense program; Colleen Lindsay, publicity and marketing manager for Doubleday Books, an imprint of Random House; and Felicia Luna Lemus, author of the novels Like Son and Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties. The panel will be moderated by Brent Gallenberger, senior marketing manager for trade books at Rodale. Thursday, November 15 at 8:00 p.nm. at The Center, 208 West 13th Street. Admission: $7 for Publishing Triangle members, $10 for nonmembers.

Where to spend some money: Saints and Sinners will hold their sixth annual literary festival May 8-11, 2008 in New Orleans. Organizers are seeking help in achieving a goal of raising $20,000 between now and December 31, 2007. Saints and Sinners is completely organized by unpaid volunteers. The fundraising goal would allow organizers to hire a much-needed, part-time office assistant to help with the pre-conference administrative work, and pay for general operating expenses to produce the event—venue rental, printing, advertising, etc. Donations would also go towards providing registration scholarships for individuals who otherwise might not be able to afford to register for the event. To help ensure the festival continues and grows, an “Archangel Membership Program” has been started. Details can be found on the Web site: www.sasfest.org. Donations may be mailed to: Saints and Sinners Literary Festival, Attention: Paul Willis, 938 Lafayette Street, #514, New Orleans, LA 70113.

Kudos: Joe Keenan was awarded this year’s Thurber Prize for humor for his novel My Lucky Star. Arch Brown’s GLBT Thorny Theater in Palm Springs received 20 nominations from the The Desert Theater League, including Outstanding Production of a Drama for The Shape Shifter and Anna Livia, Lucky in her Bridges. Pariah, a short film by Dee Rees, about a lesbian teenager, won the ₤25000 Iris Prize as the best entry of the three-day film festival in Cardiff, Wales. The film also won the NewFest festival award in New York earlier this year. Harper Lee is being awarded America's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, for her outstanding contribution to literature. Her only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and is ranked by the Guinness Book of World Records as the top selling novel of all time. The novel has sold more than 30 million copies. This year’s San Francisco Litquake festival opened up with the first Barbary Coast Award for a Lifetime of Literary Achievement presented to Armistead Maupin. Actress Laura Linney, who was in the 1994 PBS series of Maupin’s 1976 novel Tales of the City was on hand to give Maupin the award. Litquake has grown from a one-day event in the bandstand at Golden Gate Park to a weeklong festival with 354 authors in 58 venues throughout the city, at Kepler’s in Silicon Valley and Book Passage in Marin County.

And the Nominees Are: The Publishing Triangle is now accepting nominations for its 2008 fiction, nonfiction, and poetry awards, given for books published between January 1 and December 31, 2007. Each year, the organization presents six awards to lesbian and gay authors: The Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement; the Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction; the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction; the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry; the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry; and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction. Two additional awards, the Ferro-Grumley Awards for Lesbian and Gay Fiction, are presented at the same awards ceremony under the aegis of the Ferro-Grumley Literary Awards Inc. All of these literary prizes include honorariums: $3,000 for the Whitehead Award; $1,000 each for fiction and nonfiction; and $500 each for poetry. The deadline for nominations is December 3, 2007. Visit http://www.publishingtriangle.org/ for instructions and to download a nomination form. The awards themselves will be presented in a gala ceremony at the New School in Greenwich Village on April 28, 2008.

Open Calls: My Gender Cookbook, a gender and cooking anthology, seeks submissions of creative nonfiction essays and recipes that explore how gender and sexual identities affect our cooking choices: how we eat, what we eat, and with whom we eat. Essay submissions will not be considered without a recipe and should be between 500 and 3000 words. Please include a brief bio, e-mail contact info and your essay and recipe as word document attachments. Only previously unpublished materials will be considered. Submissions will be accepted no later than February 1st 2008. Please send submissions to mygendercookbook@gmail.com. ** Dark Scribe Press is seeking short story submissions for Unspeakable Horror, an anthology of queer horror tales. E-mail queries only. Queries can be emailed to publisher@darkscribepress.com and will be accepted through May 15, 2008. Response time to queries is 30-60 days. Once a query is greenlighted, the deadline for actual submissions is June 30, 2008. Response time to submissions is 30-60 days. Please put Query/Anthology in the subject line of all e-mails. Kindly note that queries with attachments will be deleted – do not send your story until you have queried first. The anthology is slated for fourth quarter 2008 publication. ** The Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in association with the Marigny Theatre Corporation and the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival is sponsoring their second annual playwright’s contest. The winning play will be produced by the Marigny Theatre Corporation and will premier the weekend of the 6th annual Saints and Sinners Literary Event, May 8-11, 2008. There is a $10 fee for every play submitted. Participants can enter more then once. In addition to a full production at the Festival, the winning playwright will receive a $500 cash prize and an “All-Access” Pass to the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival. Deadline for Submission is December 31, 2007. Visit the Saints and Sinners Web site for more details. ** Brad Nichols is looking for submissions for Island Boys, Tropical Gay Erotica. Length should be 2500-4000 words. Deadline is December 1, 2007. Submit original stories to alysonanthology@planetoutinc.com. Simone Thorne is editing Island Girls, Tropical Lesbian Erotica. Length should be 2500-4000 words. Deadline is December 1, 2007. Submit original stories to alysonanthology@planetoutinc.com. ** Sassafras Lowrey is editing Kicked out, an anthology which chronicles the experiences of former queer youth and current queer youth who were forced to leave home as minors because of their sexuality and/or gender identity. Submissions should be between 1,500 and 2,500 words in length and previously unpublished. Submit your piece via e-mail in .doc format to KickedOutAnthology@gmail.com. Multiple submissions per contributor are welcome. Deadline is March 1, 2008. More information can be found at: http://www.myspace.com/kickedoutanthology ** Richard Labonté and Lawrence Schimel are seeking submissions for Second Person Queer: How We Lived Our Lives – and How You Can Live Yours. Essays should be between 1,000-2,000 words and written in the second person (addressed to a "you"). Submissions can be sent to secondpersonqueer@gmail.com. Deadline is March 15, 2008. ** Notisha Massaquoi & Selly Thiam are seeking submissions for None-on-Record: Stories of Queer Africa. QLGBT Africans are invited to submit original, unpublished essays, poems, short stories, plays, creative non-fiction, and visual art. Submissions can be sent to NORsubmission@gmail.com. Deadline is March 31, 2008. More details can be found at www.myspace.com/noneonrecord.

Passages: Herbert Muschamp, the architecture critic for The New York Times from 1992 to 2004, died of lung cancer on October 3, 2007. One of the most influential critics of his generation, he frequently wrote about the central role played by gay men in New York's cultural history. ** Downtown icon and gay performing artist Dean Johnson died September 20, 2007. The six-foot-six promoter and poet was found dead in Washington, D.C. Johnson, 45, founded the weekly party Rock and Roll Fag Bar in the late eighties, and also started HomoCorps, a monthly gay music showcase at CBGB. At times a porn star and at other times a rock star (he fronted Dean and the Weenies and later the Velvet Mafia), he was always recognizable by his height (often augmented by heels) and brazen eyewear. Friends gathered in October at Rapture Café and Books in the East Village to remember a man who was rarely forgotten.