Lambda Literary is pleased to announce Aaron H. Aceves and Emet North as the winners of the 2025 Judith A. Markowitz Award for Exceptional New LGBTQ Writers!
The prize recognizes LGBTQ-identified writers whose work demonstrates their strong potential for promising careers. The award includes a cash prize of $1,500. Two prizes are awarded annually.
Aaron H. Aceves
Aaron H. Aceves is a bisexual, Mexican-American writer born and raised in East L.A. He graduated from Harvard College and received his MFA from Columbia University. His fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from Passages North, Epiphany, and The Iowa Review, among other places. He currently lives in Southern California after serving as an Early Career Provost Fellow at UT Austin. His debut young adult novel, This Is Why They Hate Us, was released by Simon & Schuster. It received multiple starred reviews and was named a Best Young Adult Book of 2022 by Kirkus Reviews.
Aaron Aceves has a marvelous way with words. His writing, coupled with his advocacy efforts for the queer and people of color communities, with a particular emphasis in bisexual and Latine intersectionality, makes him a deserving winner of this award. His focus on representing and advocating for historically underrepresented experiences, both within his community work and his writing, is courageous and uplifting.
A Word from Aaron H. Aceves
Emet North
Emet North has lived in a dozen states over the past decade and has no fixed residence, though they feel most at home in the mountains. In previous lives, they worked in an observational cosmology lab on a grant from NASA, taught snowboarding in Montana, researched Lie algebras, trained horses, and wrote a thesis on the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. Their debut novel, In Universes, was the winner of the 2024 Otherwise Award and was named one of the New York Times’ 10 Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels of 2024. They translate from Spanish to English with a particular focus on queer and trans voices and are always looking for new projects.
Emet North’s lush writing and their clear commitment to celebrating queer and trans voices made their submission rise to the top. We were impressed with their ability to weave queerness and trans voices into thoughtful and thought-provoking writing. North has a truly original and fearless voice. We look forward to reading their future works, and witnessing their deserved successes.
A Word from Emet North
Thank you so much to Lambda Literary for the work you do uplifting queer and trans voices and especially to Judith A. Markowitz for making this award possible. It’s an honor to be in community with past and future winners and to get to be a part of such a beautiful queer lineage. Thank you to my phenomenal editor and beloved friend, Ezra Kupor, and my two incredible agents, PJ Mark and Hafizah Geter—having a fully queer team advocating for me feels like a small miracle, for which I am constantly grateful. I’m also grateful to my broader community who helped my novel become what it is and who helped me become the person who could write it. Thank you to Maya Chesley, Riss Neilson, Katherine Packert Burke, Morgan Thomas, Kyle Kirrin, Swetha S, D & Grey Arther-Cohen, and so many others. I wish I could go back in time and tell my young, closeted self how much joy was waiting. And for all of us, I wish for a future in which queer and trans people are allowed to flourish and Palestine is free.
