The Lammys

Dawn Lundy Martin was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for her first poetry collection, A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering. A founding member of the Black Took Collective, a group of experimental black poets, she is an associate professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Life in a Box is a Pretty Life (Nightboat) investigates the ways in which language claims absolute knowledge and draws a box around lived experience. Martin writes poems that seek out moments when the box buckles, or breaks, poems that suggest there is more. Life in a Box is a Pretty Life continues Martin's investigation into what is produced in the interstices between the body, experience, and language, and how alternative narratives can yield some other knowledge about what it means to be black (or female, or queer) in contemporary America.

Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area.  He has published three books of poetry with Sarabande Books: The Darker Fall; Want , which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and won the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize; and Chord.  He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artist Trust of Washington, the Civitella Ranieri, and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow and a Jones Lecturer.  His poems and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including Poetry, The Paris Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Threepenny Review.  Baro is also the poetry editor for New England Review.

Stephen S. Mills is the author of the Lambda Award-winning book He Do the Gay Man in Different Voices (Sibling Rivalry Press) and A History of the Unmarried (Sibling Rivalry Press). He earned his MFA from Florida State University. His work has appeared in The Antioch Review, PANK, The New York Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review, Knockout, Assaracus, The Rumpus, and others. He is also the winner of the 2008 Gival Press Oscar Wilde Poetry Award and the 2014 Christopher Hewitt Award for Fiction.

Valerie Wetlaufer is a poet, editor, birth doula, and teacher. Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for her first poetry collection Mysterious Acts by My People, Wetlaufer holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Utah, an MFA in Creative Writing from Florida State University, an MA in Teaching & a BA in French from Bennington College. She is the editor of Adrienne: a poetry journal of queer women, and author of three chapbooks. Her second book, Call Me by My Other Name is forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press in 2016.