Lambda Literary is pleased to announce that Taylor Johnson and T. Kira Madden have been named the winners of the 2021 Judith A. Markowitz Award for Emerging LGBTQ Writers.
The award recognizes LGBTQ-identified writers whose work demonstrates their strong potential for promising careers. Each award includes a cash prize of $1,000. The judges for this year’s prize were Hannah Ensor and Theodore Kerr.
About Johnson, judge Xandria Phillips shared:
Taylor Johnson’s poetry reminds me of turning a corner from one room to the next at a house party in that they conjure and suspend electric moments of leisure. This poetry is a testament to the ways that black queer and trans people exist for more than the grind. In these poems, the yoke of capitalism and other violent axioms exist against swells of nature and we join the speaker, “forget about money watching the clouds over 8th and Ingraham. The clouds a rhubarb-colored ship in the sky.” And notice “The bats listening for the cicadas’ echo. Echo is a way to create space, is a metaphor for time. Time for the cop to move along I think watching the cop watch me from my porch. Fuck 12.” I see in this work the precarity within which so many of us must build our interior lives. Taylor’s poems are places I go to access sound, feeling, and touch. These words woo erotic moments through an attentiveness to presence and silence. In poems like “This is a review for Blue in Green by Miles Davis,” we receive an invitation to hold intimacy alongside the speaker. “Someone in the corner room is in love with you. Loves you enough to touch her body, wants you to watch; pull up a chair.” Taylor’s work reminds me that pleasure is still a place where I can go. Taylor’s poetic debut, Inheritance was published by Alice James Books in 2021. Their poetry has appeared in Poem-a-Day, The Baffler, and The Paris Review. Taylor has received fellowships and scholarships from Cave Canem, Tin House, and VONA/Voices. Currently, Taylor is interested in telephone booths and “experiences with art that are immersive and require the participant to step into a new reality in some way.”
On Madden, judge Calvin Gimpelvich wrote:
T Kira Mahealani Madden’s work is immediately deceptively familiar–it’s the voice of a friend or the narratives swirling around your own head, an accessibility that doesn’t quite mask the line by line skill. I finished every piece by T Kira not from any duty judging, but because I wanted to keep reading past the samples, to see what happened next. A teacher and founding Editor-in-Chief of No Tokens, a journal run by women, queer, trans, and non-binary people, her work is engages with the larger literary communities she moves in. Her debut memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Lambda Literary Award. We have a collection of short stories and a novel, featuring more of their work about queer APIA youth, to look forward to.
Taylor Johnson (left) is from Washington, DC. They are the author of Inheritance (Alice James Books, 2020), and their work appears in The Paris Review, The Baffler, Scalawag, and elsewhere. Johnson is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and a recipient of the 2017 Larry Neal Writers’ Award from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Taylor is working on a series of poems, essays, and built structures that explore gentrification, go-go music, and gender. They live in New Orleans where they listen. Explore their work at taylorjohnsonpoems.com and find them on Instagram @hoodsnax.
T Kira Mahealani Madden (right) is a Chinese, Kānaka Maoli writer, photographer, and amateur magician. A recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Hedgebrook, Tin House, MacDowell, and Yaddo, she serves as the founding Editor-in-chief of No Tokens, a magazine of literature and art. Her fiction and nonfiction has been featured in Harper’s, New York Magazine, and others, and she is the author of the 2019 New York Times Editors’ Choice memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the LAMBDA Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir. She will be an Assistant Professor of English at College of Charleston beginning Fall 2021, and facilitates writing workshops for homeless and formerly incarcerated individuals.
Taylor Johnson Photo Credit: S*an D. Henry-Smith
T. Kira Madden Photo Credit: Jac Martinez
