Lambda Literary is pleased to announce Nat Rivkin as the winner of the inaugural Karla Jay Prize for Emerging Writers in Gender and Sexuality Studies!
The prize recognizes an individual with an emerging career in Gender and Sexuality Studies research, writing, and publication. The winner will receive a cash prize of $1,500.
Nat Rivkin
Nat Rivkin is a Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at Vanderbilt University. Her current book project examines four specific figures in late medieval and early modern literature: the monstrous birth, the virgin, the hermaphrodite, and the angel. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in College Literature, Early Theatre, Exemplaria, Medieval Ecocriticisms, The Routledge Companion to Queer Literary Studies, and Trans Milton.
Rivkin generates wonderfully constructive critical dialogues. Her analyses fully acknowledge the specifics of past scholarship (Stryker, deGruy, etc.) while they revise and extend this work in ways that are at once startling and firmly evidenced. Rivkin’s engagement with literary texts matches the sophistication of her critical accomplishment. Through nimble and careful readings, she demonstrates that very contemporary and consistently violent political emphases on gender, race, and trans life are rooted in early modern, medieval, and earlier discourses. Nevertheless, Rivkin’s project is liberatory: to quote her own crisp cogent prose, “A usable history need not be benign.” With wit and precision, she distinguishes fingerholds of resistance— the fluidity and effulgence of gender— within the complex discursivity of early texts. Her work’s attention to the intersections of racialization and gendering, its balanced consideration of very-well-read and noncanonical literature, and its urgent interrelation of past and present make Rivkin an emergent leader in gender and sexuality studies.
A Word from Nat Rivkin
It is a sincere honor to accept Lambda Literary’s Karla Jay Award for Emerging Writers in Gender and Sexuality Studies. I find myself turning to Karla Jay and Allen Young’s edited collection Out of Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation as I attempt to express my gratitude: in their words, Jay’s “ground-breaking work has made all our lives a little easier, a little freer, and much less solitary.” I was lucky enough to experience some of that ease, freedom, and companionship in my undergraduate encounters with the Gay Liberation Front’s manifestos––Jay was an early member––over a decade ago. I hope that I can continue Jay’s intellectual trajectory as well as those of my queer and feminist predecessors who have made my writing possible.
