This June, BookSwell was proud to be a sponsor of the 38th Annual Lambda Literary Awards. For more than three decades, the Lammys have celebrated and championed LGBTQ+ writers, and getting to stand with that community — our name up on the sponsor wall beside houses like Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Hachette — was one of the proudest moments of our year.
We put our heart and soul into BookSwell, and giving back to the writers who have shaped so many of us is the best part of this work. Being in that room was a reminder of exactly why we do it.
Southern California showed up
Among this year’s honorees were writers close to home and close to our hearts:
- Ben Kline won Gay Poetry for It Was Never Supposed To Be. We were lucky enough to host Ben for a reading, and you can still watch it here.
- Gustavo Hernandez was a finalist for Gay Poetry with Bachelor (FlowerSong Press). Hernandez is the Orange County Poet Laureate, born in Jalisco and raised in Santa Ana.
- José Enrique Medina, a Whittier poet and PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, won the Samuel Prize for Emerging Writers Over 50 — a reminder that it is never too late to claim your place on the page.
- heidi andrea restrepo rhodes was a finalist for Lesbian Poetry with Wayward Creatures. A queer, disabled poet of the Colombian diaspora, she lives in Southern California and teaches at Pomona College.
- Mac Crane was a finalist for Lesbian Fiction with A Sharp Endless Need, a tender, propulsive novel about a queer teenage basketball prodigy. Crane writes from San Diego.
- Milo Todd won Transgender Fiction for The Lilac People, a novel of trans survival and chosen family in the shadow of Nazi Germany that reads as urgently now as ever.
Keep celebrating with us
Our June Read Local SoCal pick, Before You Can Fly by Jase Peeples, was just named a finalist for the inaugural 2026 Kirkus Indie Awards in Romance. We’re celebrating queer SoCal lit all year long. Subscribe to the BookSwell newsletter to read our full Lammys feature and keep up with everything we’re reading.
