Congratulations to Justin Phillip Reed on debut Indecency winning the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry!

National Book Award-winning poet Justin Phillip Reed's Indecency, published by Coffee House Press, has been named the winner of the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry.

The Lambda Literary Awards (the “Lammys”) identify and celebrate the best lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender books of the year and affirm that LGBTQ stories are part of the literature of the world. The Lammys, which receive national and international media attention, bring together 600 attendees— including nominees, celebrities, sponsors, and publishing executives—to celebrate excellence in LGBTQ publishing. It is the most prestigious and glamorous LGBTQ literary event in the world. Not Here by Hieu Minh Nguyen, also published by Coffee House Press, was a finalist for the award in Gay Poetry.

“So much about this is remarkable to me, not the least of which is the list of other finalists. It's nearly bizarre, too, that Indecency should share a laud carried by the books of poets who in fact made its poems possible or imaginable—francine j. harris, Dawn Lundy Martin, Carl Phillips, and Phillip B. Williams among them. I celebrate these queernesses regularly and especially in this moment.”
—Justin Phillip Reed

Indecency is Justin Phillip Reed’s first book, which also won the 2018 National Book Award and was a finalist for the 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Coffee House Press will release Reed’s second collection, The Malevolent Volume, in April 2020.

“[Reed’s] poems take up the body in desire and violence, and they do so by thrusting the reader into a stark visceral encounter with their material.” —The New York Times

Justin Phillip Reed is an American poet living in St. Louis. His work appears in African American Review, Best American Essays, Callaloo, the Kenyon Review, Obsidian, and elsewhere. He holds a BA in creative writing from Tusculum College and an MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis. The author of the chapbook A History of Flamboyance (YesYes Books 2016), he has received fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation and the Conversation Literary Festival. Reed currently organizes the St. Louis community- based poetry workshop series Most Folks At Work. He was born and raised in South Carolina.