Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Weekly column for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here .  Welcome, our new friends who subscribed to this mailing list at the Association of Writing Programs conference in San Antonio. Gaudy Boy had a great outing, and we trust that you did too. Please take a little time to explore in this weekly newsletter Singapore Unbound/Gaudy Boy's many features and ventures. We're so pleased to announce that Lawrence Lacambra Ypil's The Experiment of the Tropics has just been named a Lambda Finalist. The Lammys, as the awards are known colloquially, recognize the best LGBTQ books published in the previous year. Past winners include Alison Bechdel, Michael Cunningham, Roxane Gay, and Audre Lorde, among others. The icing on the cake is that this year's finalists were announced in Oprah's The O Magazine . In addition to the Lammy nomination, Larry's book of poems has also been longlisted for The Believer Book Awards, the results of which will be announced in ...

Steep Tea is now available as an e-book around the world! The formatting looks a little wonky in the preview, but I've been assured by the publishers that the actual e-book looks good. Last night, read for the NY Lambda Finalists' Reading at Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. Good turnout. WL, WKN, YW, and AH came. WKN brought a friend who found my book in the Union Square Barnes & Noble. I especially enjoyed hearing Chinelo Okparanta read from her Nigerian novel Under the Udala Trees. I thought the audience was very attentive when I read "Attribution" and "Hub Caps as Big as Ashtrays." Wanted to distance myself just a little from the atmosphere of tribalism in the event, so stressed my Singaporean origins and biases.

Steep Tea is a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award ! The announcement was made yesterday. Very pleased and proud to be in the company of Carl Phillips and Nicholas Wong.

Lambda launches its new website today. The email blast quite rightly boasts that the design team has built a six-figure website on a four-figure budget. The site looks as professional as other major literary websites such as those of the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Society of America. Less content, because the site is relatively new, but poised to grow. Today the Lambda Literary Foundation announced the launch of a  new online webzine  and blog community for LGBTQ writers and readers. The newLambda Literary webzine will aggregate the best links from LGBTQ and mainstream book news websites and newspapers, feature provocative interviews, under-reported stories, and thoughtful, of-the-moment book reviews and nurture a social community that comments, critiques, links back, twitters, blogs, and interacts both online and in person. The same email blast says that the finalists for the Lambda Awards will be announced in the week of March 15, not so many days away...

I don't know where I read it, but I remember reading the event last night was supposed to start at 6. When I arrived at 6, I was told by a very cute looking guy at the table that 6 to 7 was reception for the writers, and the reading would begin at 7. That did not put me in a good mood, though some sneaky looks at guy-at-the-table soon lightened my mood.  The reading by the Lambda Award finalists was worth waiting for. One poet read, many novelists, and countless memoirists, making up a total of 12 readers that evening. Many were entertaining, but only a few reached into the place where only literature can reach.  I was captivated by a fictional narrative about a black boy joining an all-white class in an all-white town. The narrator, a girl classmate, was utterly convincing in her perplexed courage. What could have come across so easily as moralistic turns out, instead, to be truly novelistic in its depiction of characters and situation.  The other fascinating reader was another le...