Award Winner

Leap by Z. Egloff

It’s the summer of 1979 in a small Ohio town, and Rowan Marks is simply trying to survive the yawning gulf of time before she leaves for college. Her life is a chaotic mix of domestic stress: her older brother is sinking into substance abuse, her family is harboring deep fractures, and her male best friend, Danny, has just confessed he is in love with her. Everything shifts, however, with the arrival of Catherine, the standoffish new girl in town. Though they initially clash, an intense connection develops, and Catherine completely steals Rowan’s heart. When a family crisis brings hidden secrets crashing to light, Rowan is forced to make a definitive leap into adulthood, navigating her first queer romance and the complexities of her own identity.

A Field Guide to Deception by Jill Malone

A Field Guide to Deception is a 2009 contemporary novel by Jill Malone, published by Bywater Books. The book is an explicit work of lesbian fiction that won the 2010 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, focusing heavily on themes of lesbian relationships, grief, secrets, and makeshift queer family dynamics.

Following her aunt s death, Claire Bernard finds herself struggling with deep grief, managing a sudden shift in her role as a mother, and maintaining a unique secret: she was the ghostwriter behind her late aunt’s famous mushroom field guides. Seeking to renovate her aunt’s Spokane home, Claire hires Liv, a sharp, emotionally guarded carpenter who spends her nights drifting through local bars to avoid commitment. As the two women enter an intense, complicated relationship, a tangled web of hidden pasts, shifting alliances, and unrequited love from close friends threatens to unravel their fragile connection.

Man Enough by Beth Burnett

Man Enough (2012) is a celebrated queer romantic comedy by author Beth Burnett (who now publishes under Finnian Burnett). Published by Sapphire Books, the novel won Rainbow Awards for both Best Transgender Fiction and Best Debut Novel. Because it explicitly features a lesbian protagonist, a lesbian best friend subplot, and deals closely with trans-masculine romance, it has historically been categorized under both lesbian and transgender contemporary literature.

(Note: The author has since taken the book out of print due to shifting language surrounding the trans experience since 2012, but it remains a notable title in contemporary sapphic/queer publishing history.)

A ground-breaking queer romantic comedy, Man Enough follows Davey Carter, a woman whose life is a bit chaotic due to her non-existent love life, a pot-smoking mother living in her apartment, and a sneaking suspicion that her lesbian best friend is secretly in love with her. Things turn around when she meets Danny, a kind, intelligent, and charismatic man who seems to be her perfect match. However, Danny is harboring a secret: he is a transgender man. Written from Davey’s point of view, the novel balances humor and heart as it explores themes of identity, conditional attraction, and the evolving dynamics of love and friendship within the queer community.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Celie is a poor black woman whose letters tell the story of 20 years of her life, beginning at age 14 when she is being abused and raped by her father and attempting to protect her sister from the same fate, and continuing over the course of her marriage to ‘Mister,’ a brutal man who terrorizes her. Celie eventually learns that her abusive husband has been keeping her sister’s letters from her and the rage she feels, combined with an example of love and independence provided by her close friend Shug, pushes her finally toward an awakening of her creative and loving self.

Crime Against Nature by Minnie Bruce Pratt

A masterwork of twentieth-century lesbian-feminist literature, Minnie Bruce Pratt’s Crime Against Nature is a deeply personal sequence of narrative poems exploring the devastating intersections of motherhood, state oppression, and sexual identity. The collection takes its title directly from the language used in the anti-sodomy statutes of the era, under which Pratt was stripped of the legal custody of her young sons simply for being an open lesbian. In visceral, precise, and emotionally raw language, Pratt charts her journey through the wreckage of her marriage, the agonizing grief and shame of losing her children, and her eventual reclamation of self-worth and sexual joy within the broader queer liberation movement. It stands as an enduring classic of political and erotic lesbian verse.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick Winner of the Pulitzer Prize * Winner of the National Book Award Published to unprecedented acclaim,The Color Purple established Alice Walker as a major voice in modern fiction. This is the story of two sisters–one a missionary in Africa and the other a child wife living in the South–who sustain their loyalty to and trust in each other across time, distance, and silence. Beautifully imagined and deeply compassionate, this classic novel of American literature is rich with passion, pain, inspiration, and an indomitable love of life. ‘Intense emotional impact . . . Indelibly affecting . . . Alice Walker is a lavishly gifted writer.’ –New York Times Book Review ‘Places Walker in the company of Faulkner.’ –The Nation ‘Superb . . . A work to stand beside literature of any time and place.’ –San Francisco Chronicle ‘A novel of permanent importance.’ — Peter S. Prescott,Newsweek

Against Memoir Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms by Michelle Tea

Winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award, Michelle Tea s electric essay collection spans two decades of chronicling the vibrant, messy realities of marginalized queer life in America. Divided into thematic sections tracking art, writing, and queerness, Tea turns a sharp journalistic and deeply personal lens onto the countercultural movements that shaped her. The book documents a broad spectrum of outsider history, including a deep-dive on SCUM Manifesto author Valerie Solanas, an intimate memorial to the 1990s San Francisco lesbian biker gang HAGS, and firsthand dispatches from the late-1990s political tensions of Camp Trans. Equal parts biting wit, cultural critique, and raw vulnerability, the text acts as an essential archive of late-twentieth-century lesbian-feminist and trans activism.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Winner of the National Book Award as well as the Pulitzer Prize, ‘The Color Purple’ established Alice Walker as a major voice in modern fiction. Her unforgettable portrait of Celie and her friends, family, and lovers is rich with passion, pain, inspiration, and an indomitable love of life. Beautifully imagined and deeply compassionate, ‘The Color Purple’ is a classic of American literature.

In Another Place, Not Here by Dionne Brand

Dionne Brand’s luminous debut novel, In Another Place, Not Here, tells of two contemporary Caribbean women – one urban, passionate, and idealistic, the other constrained by disillusion and rural poverty, each in her own spiritual exile – who find brief refuge in each other on an island in the midst of political uprising.Elizete dreams of running to another place to escape the harshness of her daily life on the island. Knowing better than to hope for much, she lives in a world of lush inventions that stave off reality. Then she meets Verlia, a woman in constant flight, who lives in Toronto and has returned to her island birthplace with hopes of revolution. Both women are dreaming of each other’s reality – and of each other. Their tumultuous story moves between city and island, between material and spiritual poverty, between community and isolation, between fantasy and reality, in a past and future time where the dream is always, again, deferred.