ALA Annual Conference 2010: The Stonewall Book Awards
Last week at the American Library Association Annual Conference in sweltering Washington, DC, I began my duties as chairperson of the ALA Stonewall Book Award Committee.
A bit of the history of this award—in 1971, the Gay Book Award was established to honor the work of highest quality in the then relatively small gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender publishing world. Thus the oldest national book award for this genre of literature was established by a grassroots group of gay activist librarians, most notably, Barbara Gittings and Israel Fishman in whose honor the literature and non-fiction awards were named.  The committee just announced its first award for children’s and young adult literature. The award is not yet named, but we hope that will happen in January, when the 2011 awards are announced.
Our committee of 14 includes librarians from all over the country with a wide variety of specializations that range from academic to school to corporate. Over the course of a year we examine an average of 200 books published in English between September 30, 2009 and September 30, 2010. Note I wrote examined, not read! I will read about 110, depending on their length. It’s often easy to determine whether or not a title will make the top 15 in the 3 categories. Getting my colleagues on the Stonewall Book Awards Committee to agree on what makes a book worth our time is another story.
The year culminates in a large event, The Stonewall Book Awards Brunch. This year all three winning authors were there to speak about their writing.  The first Stonewall Children’s and Young Adult Literature Award went to Nick Burd for his novel, Vast Fields of Ordinary, published by Penguin. The Barbara Gittings Literature Award was presented to David Francis for his novel Stray Dog Winter, published by MacAdam/Cage. The Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award was won by Nathaniel Nathaniel Frank for his work “Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America”, published by St. Martin’s Press.
Some of the honor book authors were also present to accept their certificates and say a few words to the crowd. They were in the Children’s and Young Adult category: Marcus Ewert, accompanied by his parents, who wrote “10,000 Dresses”, published by Seven Stories Press, and Linas Alsenas, who wrote “Gay America: Struggle for Equality”, published by Amulet Books.
The author of the honor book “God Says No”, James James Hannaham, was also recognized. His book was published by McSweeney’s Publishing.
The Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award went to Nathaniel Frank for his work “Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America”, published by St. Martin’s Press.
Honor author Stewart Weisberg will also be recognized for his book “Barney Frank: The Story of America’s Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman, published by the University of Massachusetts Press.
For the 2011 awards we are currently looking at over 100 titles, but this is the first round.
The purpose of these awards is not simply to honor the best books of the year, but to provide readers and libraries with a short list of GLBT books they might purchase for their collections. I give 80% of the review copies I receive to the Sweet Briar College Library, thus building the collection in gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender non-fiction, fiction, drama, poetry as well as children’s and young adult literature.
Please don’t offer me anything else to read for a while!
Here is the list of all of the winners past and present.
http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/rts/glbtrt/stonewall/honored/index.cfm

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