Lambda Literary is pleased to announce Minh Huynh Vu as the winner of the 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.
Minh Huynh Vu
Minh Huynh Vu is a writer and teacher based in New Haven, CT. They are pursuing a Ph.D. in American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies with a Graduate Certificate in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration at Yale University.
Thinking and tinkering with material cultures of discard, decay, and decomposition across the Pacific, Minh is currently completing a dissertation all about cardboard boxes—across war zones, assembly lines, ports, front porches, and landfills—as these seemingly innocuous containers that continue to contour the militarized and capitalist matrices of US empire and its endless enfoldments across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Their research is featured or forthcoming in ASAP/Journal, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, positions: asia critique, and Trans Asia Photography.
Minh Huynh Vu’s writing is at once critically agile and newly illuminating. Their reading of the cardboard box’s many uses in the wake of Operation Babylift at the conclusion of the Vietnam War exemplifies what queer studies can accomplish: they change how we perceive our mundane surroundings, and they do so with grace and some unexpected geometry too. Reaching from Amazon fulfillment centers to contemporary art galleries, Vu’s work shows us how those corrugated and, in their words, “endless enfoldments of empire” continue to operate in the background of our lives today. It is an absolute pleasure to award Vu the 2026 Karla Jay Prize for Emerging Writers in Gender and Sexuality Studies.
