February Publishing Notes

The buzz: Little, Brown will publish Elton John's Love is the Cure: Ending the Global AIDS Epidemic, telling "the very personal story of [his] life during the AIDS epidemic, including his agony at seeing friend after friend perish needlessly" as through "his stories of close encounters with people like Ryan White, Freddie Mercury, and many others, he will convey the personal toll AIDS has taken on his life--and his infinite determination to stop its spread." Proceeds will go to the Elton John AIDS Foundation. John will also narrate the audiobook.

Collin Kelley’s new novel, Remain In Light, is one of the 10 finalists for the 2012 Townsend Prize for Fiction. The award will be given at a ceremony in April at the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

This month Signal 8 Press is releasing Marshall Moore’s new short story collection, The Infernal Republic. The press has also just released a Kindle-only e-chapbook titled Il look del diavolo containing three short stories that were translated and published in Italian.

This month Twelve Press releases Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America by Chris Bram, a narrative history of gay men's literature from World War II to the present.

Outwrite Books & Coffeehouse, the LGBT bookstore in Atlanta, has closed. Shelf Awareness, a publishing industry email publication, reported the bookstore had more than $500,000 in debt.

Next month Sibling Rivalry Press will release He Do the Gay Man in Different Voices, a collection of poetry by Stephen S. Mills.

Perry Brass will be writing a monthly column at the Blog "Ask A New Yorker," called The Wisdom of Desire, dealing with some issues the author has dealt with for his book The Manly Art of Seduction. http://askanewyorker.com/blog/perrybrass/the-wisdom-of-desire-time-for-all-you-cavaliers-to-come-out-of-the-closet

Toronto's Glad Day Bookshop, "believed to be the oldest gay and lesbian book store in the world and the first of its kind in Canada" according to the Toronto Star, is up for sale after a drop in sales in 2010.

The January 2012 issue of The Queer Foundation Scholar, is now online.

Contributors from Best Gay Erotica 2012 & Best Lesbian Erotica 2012, including Sinclair Sexsmith, Gregory Norris, Sam Miller, and Kathleen Warnock, will be reading Thursday, February 9th at 7 pm at Bluestockings, 172 Allen St. in the East Village, NYC. Admission is free, though donations are accepted. Books will be on sale, and coffee/tea are available at a small snack bar. http://bluestockings.com/,

The book tour for Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots, edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, is about to begin. Stops include Tuesday, February 14, 6 pm at the San Francisco Main Library; February 20 at 7:30 pm at Pegasus Books Downtown in Berkeley, CA; March 5 at 7:30 pm at Powell's on Hawthorne in Portland, OR, and March 14 at 7 pm at Little Sisters in Vancouver, BC.

Ancestors: A Queer Writers of Color Reading has been organized by Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán as an off-site event for the 2012 AWP creative writers conference in Chicago. Sponsored by the Lambda Literary Foundation, the event is free and open to the public. Thursday, March 1, 2012, from 7 pm to 10pm, Center on Halsted, Chicago. Readers include OluSeyi OluToyin Adebanjo, Nancy Agabian, Ryka Aoki, Tamiko Beyer, Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, Ching-In Chen, Matthew R. K. Haynes-Kekahuna, Lorenzo Herrera y Lozano, David Keali'i, Emil Keliane, Janet McAdams, Deborah A. Miranda, Claudia Narváez-Meza, vaimoana litia makakaufaki niumeitolu, Emma Pérez, Jai Arun Ravine, Charles Rice-González, Trish Salah, James Thomas Stevens, D. Antwan Stewart, Max Wolf Valerio, & Jennifer Lisa Vest.

The Rainbow Book Fair will be March 24, 2012 from 11 am to 5:30 pm in New York. Check the Web site (http://rainbowbookfair.org/) for more details on exhibitors, speakers, and events, which next year will take over two floors at the LGBT Center in Manhattan.

Sibling Rivalry Press and the poetry journal Assaracus will sponsor a celebratory reading of more than 25 poets Friday, March 23, 2012 at CLAGS in New York City.

The Outwrite book fair in Washington D.C. has been scheduled for August 3-4, 2012. For more information visit http://www.thedccenter.org/blog/2012/01/volunteers-needed-help-plan-the-outwrite-lgbt-book-fair.html.

In order to have an extra spectacular tenth anniversary celebration in 2013, the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans will be holding a SAS 9.5 from May 18-20, 2012, a fund raising event for the tenth anniversary festival in 2013. The SAS 9.5 agenda includes a book launch cocktail party celebrating its 3rd annual short fiction contest, a series of custom manuscript review sessions, and other special events.

Open Calls: Squares & Rebels, a -new LGBT imprint of Handtype Press, plans to bring out two poetry anthologies in the fall of 2012 devoted to LGBT poets living in the Upper Midwest (MI, MN, ND, SD, or WI). Send 5 to 7 unpublished original poems as a Word file.No simultaneous submissions or reprints, please. Lesbians should submit their work to the editor Kate Lynn Hibbard: hibbarka@gmail.com. Gay men should submit their work to the editor Raymond Luczak: squaresandrebels@gmail.com. Deadline: Friday, May 18, 2012.

Sibling Rivalry Press is seeking submissions for an anthology scheduled for publication in August 2013. This assignment is so gay: LGBTIQ Poets on the Art of Teaching, edited by Megan Volpert, will be the first-ever anthology to feature an international roster of LGBTIQ poets writing about and from the teacher's perspective. Whether elementary or collegiate, public or private, the school is an institutional battleground for representations of queer culture. This book will examine the joyous burden that is the experience of LGBTIQ teachers, an inherently valuable and until now relatively invisible piece of the educational puzzle. Submit up to five previously unpublished poems. Poems must engage some aspect of teaching, but need not be explicitly queer-themed. Author must identify as LGBTIQ. Submission period is open January 1 through June 1, 2012. Authors can expect reply by July 1, 2012.for more details visit: http://www.thisassignmentissogay.com/.

Inspired by Arab Spring and the Occupy Wall Street movement, editor Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is seeking submissions of We Are Not Just the 99%: Queering the Occupy Movement, Reimagining Resistance. Send rants, manifestoes, journal entries, and essays up to 5000 words, as Word or text file attachments only, to nobodypasses@gmail.com. Include a brief bio. In addition to written nonfiction work, query first before submitting art, photography, posters, flyers, and other forms of visual documentation queering the Occupy movement. The deadline is March 20, 2012.