Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry

The Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry is an annual literary award presented by the Lambda Literary Foundation to a gay-themed book of poetry by a male writer.

Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry
Awarded for	Literary award
Sponsored by	Lambda Literary Foundation
Date	Annual

At the first two Lambda Literary Awards in 1989 and 1990, a single award for LGBT Poetry, irrespective of gender, was presented. Beginning with the 3rd Lambda Literary Awards in 1991, the poetry award was split into two separate awards for Gay Poetry and Lesbian Poetry. These separate awards have been presented continuously since then, with exception of the 20th Lambda Literary Awards in 2008, when a merged LGBTQ poetry award was again presented for that year only.

Honorees

Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry winners and finalists

Year	Author	Title	Result	Ref.
1991	Michael Lassell	Decade Dance	Winner
	Francisco X. Alarcón	Body in Flames	Finalist
	Mark Ameen	Buried Body
	Kenny Fries	Healing Notebooks
	James Broughton	Special Deliveries
1992	Assotto Saint (ed.)	The Road Before Us: 100 Gay Black Poets	Winner	[1]
	Mark Doty	Bethlehem in Broad Daylight	Finalist	[1]
	David Trinidad	Hand Over Heart
	Perry Brass	Sex-Charge
	John Ash	The Burnt Pages
1993	Edward Field	Counting Myself Lucky	Winner	[2]
	Essex Hemphill	Ceremonies	Finalist	[2]
	Rudy Kikel	Long Division
	Tim Dlugos	Strong Place
	Thom Gunn	The Man with Night Sweats
1994	Michael Klein	1990	Winner (tie)	[3]
	James Schuyler	Collected Poems
	Mark Doty	My Alexandria	Finalist	[3]
	William Bory	Orpheus in his Underwear
	Carl Cook	Tranquil Lake of Love
1995	Thom Gunn	Collected Poems	Winner	[4]
	Richard McCann	Ghost Letters	Finalist	[4]
	Rafael Campo	The Other Man Was Me
	Paul Monette	West of Yesterday, East of Summer
	Assotto Saint	Wishing for Wings
1996	Mark Doty	Atlantis	Winner	[5]
	David Laurents	Badboy Book of Erotic Verse	Finalist	[5]
	Timothy Liu	Burnt Offerings
	Carl Phillips	Cortege
	James Merrill	Scattering of Salts
1997	Rafael Campo	What the Body Told	Winner	[6]
	Kenny Fries	Anesthesia	Finalist	[6]
	Reginald Shepherd	Angel, Interrupted
	Michael Lassell	Eros in Boystown
	Jaime Manrique	My Night With Federico Garcia Lorca
1998	Cyrus Cassells	Beautiful Signor	Winner	[7]
	Justin Chin	Bite Hard	Finalist	[7]
	Frank Bidart	Desire
	Tom Carey	Desire: Poems 1986-1996
	James Broughton (ed. Jim Cory)	Packing Up for Paradise: Selected Poems 1946-1996
1999	J. D. McClatchy	Ten Commandments	Winner	[8]
	Michael Lassell	A Flame for the Touch That Matters	Finalist	[8]
	Edward Field	A Frieze for a Temple of Love
	Timothy Liu	Say Goodnight
	Mark Doty	Sweet Machine
2000	Mark Wunderlich	The Anchorage	Winner (tie)	[9]
	Richard Howard	Trappings
	Rafael Campo	Diva	Finalist	[9]
	Marvin K. White	Last Rights
	G. Winston James	Lyric
2001	Carl Phillips	Pastoral	Winner	[10]
	Thom Gunn	Boss Cupid	Finalist	[10]
	David Trinidad	Plasticville
	Michael Lassell and Elena Georgiou	The World in Us
	Timothy Liu	Word of Mouth
2002	Mark Doty	Source	Winner	[11]
	Constantine Cavafy with Theoharis C. Theoharis (trans.)	Before Time Could Change Them	Finalist	[11]
	Timothy Liu	Hard Evidence
	Justin Chin	Harmless Medicine
	J. D. McClatchy	Love Speaks Its Name
2003	J. D. McClatchy	Hazmat	Winner	[12]
	Rafael Campo	Landscape with Human Figure	Finalist	[12]
	Reginald Harris	Ten Tongues
	Krandall Kraus	The Christmas Poems
	David Groff	Theory of Devolution
2004	Mark Bibbins	Sky Lounge	Winner	[13]
	Henri Cole	Middle Earth	Finalist	[13]
	Reginald Shepherd	Otherhood: Poems
	Peter Pereira	Saying the World
	Rafael Campo	The Healing Art
2005	Luis Cernuda	Written in Water	Winner	[14]
	D. A. Powell	Cocktails	Finalist	[14]
	Marvin K. White	nothin’ ugly fly
	Carl Phillips	The Rest of Love
	Mark Wunderlich	Voluntary Servitude
2006	Richard Siken	Crush	Winner	[15]
	Aaron Smith	Blue on Blue Ground	Finalist	[15]
	Timothy Liu	For Dust Thou Art
	Mark Doty	School of the Arts
	Martin Pousson	Sugar
2007	Jim Elledge	A History of My Tattoo	Winner	[16]
	Justin Chin	Gutted	Finalist	[16]
	Rigoberto González	Other Fugitives & Other Strangers
	Jeffrey Conway	The Album That Changed My Life
	Dwaine Rieves	When the Eye Forms
2008	No award presented
2009	Mark Doty	Fire to Fire	Winner (tie)	[17]
	James Allen Hall	Now You're the Enemy
	Jack Spicer (Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian, eds.)	My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer	Finalist	[17]
	Jericho Brown	Please
	Rick Barot	Want
2010	Benjamin S. Grossberg	Sweet Core Orchard	Winner	[18]
	Randall Mann	Breakfast with Thom Gunn	Finalist	[18]
	Brent Goodman	The Brother Swimming Beneath Me
	Charles Jensen	The First Risk
	Tom Healy	What the Right Hand Knows
2011	Brian Teare	Pleasure	Winner	[19][20]
	Greg Hewett	darkacre	Finalist	[21]
	James Schuyler	Other Flowers: Uncollected Poems
	James L. White	The Salt Ecstasies
	Michael Klein	then, we were still living
2012	Tim Dlugos (David Trinidad, ed.)	A Fast Life: The Collected Poems of Tim Dlugos	Winner	[22]
	David Trinidad	Dear Prudence: New and Selected Poems	Finalist
	Carl Phillips	Double Shadow
	Thomas Meyer	Kintsugi
	Paul Legault	The Other Poems
2013	Stephen S. Mills	He Do the Gay Man in Different Voices	Winner	[23]
	Aaron Smith	Appetite	Finalist	[23]
	Richard Blanco	Looking for the Gulf Motel
	Patrick Donnelly	Nocturnes of the Brothel of Ruin
	Eduardo C. Corral	Slow Lightning
2014	Rigoberto González	Unpeopled Eden	Winner	[24][25]
	Rafael Campo	Alternative Medicine	Finalist	[24]
	David Groff	Clay
	Brian Teare	Companion Grasses
	Frank Bidart	Metaphysical Dog
	Angelo Nikolopoulos	Obscenely Yours
	Carl Phillips	Silverchest
	Randall Mann	Straight Razor
	Michael D. Snediker	The Apartment of Tragic Appliances
	Michael Klein	The Talking Day
2015	Danez Smith	[insert] boy	Winner	[26][27][28][29]
	David J. Daniels	Clean	Finalist	[26]
	Timothy Liu	Don’t Go Back to Sleep
	C. A. Conrad	ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness
	Saeed Jones	Prelude to Bruise
	Jericho Brown	The New Testament
	Michael Broder	This Life Now
	Hieu Minh Nguyen	This Way to the Sugar
2016	Nicholas Wong	Crevasse	Winner (tie)	[30][31]
	Carl Phillips	Reconnaissance
	Roberto F. Santiago	Angel Park	Finalist	[32]
	Rickey Laurentiis	Boy with Thorn
	Francisco X. Alarcón	Canto Hondo/Deep Song
	Ben Ladouceur	Otter
	Jee Leong Koh	Steep Tea
	Ralph Hamilton	Teaching a Man to Unstick His Tail
2017	Phillip B. Williams	Thief in the Interior	Winner	[33][34]
	Bryan Borland	DIG	Finalist	[35]
	Ocean Vuong	Night Sky with Exit Wounds
	Aaron Smith	Primer
	Sjohnna McCray	Rapture
	C. Dale Young	The Halo
	Rajiv Mohabir	The Taxidermist’s Cut
	Derrick Austin	Trouble the Water
2018	C. A. Conrad	While Standing in Line for Death	Winner	[36][37][38]
	Danez Smith	Don’t Call Us Dead	Finalist	[39]
	Charif Shanahan	Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing
	Tommy Pico	Nature Poem
	Randall Mann	Proprietary
	Cedar Sigo	Royals
	Frederick Speers	So Far Afield
	Chen Chen	When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities
2019	Justin Phillip Reed	Indecency	Winner	[40][41]
	Aldrin Valdez	ESL or You Weren’t Here	Finalist	[42]
	Kazim Ali	Inquisition
	Tommy Pico	Junk
	Hieu Minh Nguyen	Not Here
	Jonah Mixon-Webster	Stereo(TYPE)
	Brane Mozetič	Unfinished Sketches of a Revolution (tr. Barbara Jursa)
	Carl Phillips	Wild Is the Wind
2020	Cyrée Jarelle Johnson	Slingshot	Winner	[43][44][45]
	Brian Teare	Doomstead Days	Finalist	[46][47]
	Jake Skeets	Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers
	Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué	Losing Miami
	Billy-Ray Belcourt	NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field
	Lawrence Lacambra Ypil	The Experiment of the Tropics
	Douglas Crane	The Revisionist & The Astropastorals
	Jericho Brown	The Tradition
2021	Eduardo C. Corral	Guillotine	Winner	[48][49][50]
	Tommye Blount	Fantasia for the Man in Blue	Finalist	[51]
	Romeo Oriogun	Sacrament of Bodies
	Ted Rees	Thanksgiving: A Poem
	Justin Phillip Reed	The Malevolent Volume
2022	John Keene	Punks: New & Selected Poems	Winner	[52]
	Nicholas Wong	Besiege Me	Finalist	[53]
	Michael Walsh	Creep Love
	Miguel Murphy	Shoreditch
	Derrick Austin	Tenderness
2023	Padraig Regan	Some Integrity	Winner	[54]
	Saeed Jones	Alive at the End of the World	Finalist	[55]
	Aldo Amparán	Brother Sleep
	Angelo Nikolopoulos	Pleasure
	Chris Tse	Super Model Minority
2024	Charif Shanahan	Trace Evidence	Winner	[56]
	Paul Stephenson	Hard Drive	Finalist	[57]
	Richard Blanco	Homeland of My Body: New and Selected Poems
	Emanuel Xavier	Love(ly) Child
	Grant Chemidlin	What We Lost in the Swamp

See also

• Thom Gunn Award