Poet Xandria Phillips Wins One of Two Awards for Emerging Writers From Lambda Literary

The winners of the 2020 Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging LGBTQ Writers have been announced by Lambda Literary, and include poet and artist Xandria Phillips, author of the full-length collection, HULL (Nightboat, 2019). The awards acknowledge those "whose work demonstrates their strong potential for promising careers," and come with a $1,000 purse.

Judge Hannah Ensor quoted Luiza Flynn-Goodlett in her lauding of the book, saying it's “vast in both ambition and scope, striving to capture the depths and complexity of queer diasporic African identity in verse that is as fierce as it is tender and searing as it is celebratory.” More from Ensor:

In reading Xandria Phillips’s poems and hybrid texts, we wonder what it is “to partake in a gender, to fashion one’s self a living process of it.” Their work is rigorous, demanding, lush and luscious, complicated, full of aural and physical pleasures and all of the readerly implication involved in feeling those pleasures. Xandria Phillips has written some of my favorite poems; they are kaleidoscopic, shimmering, asking new things of their reader with each new return. Someday I hope we’ll all get to take Xandria’s courses…

Read on about the awards, Phillips, and the winner in fiction, at Lambda Literary. Congrats to all!