Lambda Literary is pleased to announce Amy Beth Sisson as the winner of the 2025 J. Michael Samuel Prize for Emerging Writers Over 50!
This award is made possible by writer and philanthropist Chuck Forester, who created it out of the firmly held belief that “Writers who start late are just as good as other writers, it just took the buggers more time.” The prize will go to an unpublished LGBTQ writer over 50 working in any genre. The award includes a cash prize of $5,000.
Amy Beth Sisson
2025 winner Amy Beth Sisson (any pronouns) lives near the skunk cabbages in a town outside of Philly. Her poetry has appeared in Cleaver Magazine, Philadelphia Stories, The Shoutflower, Hot Pink Magazine and others, and is forthcoming in Plant-Human Quarterly and the anthology Queer Flora, Fauna, Funga, edited by Frances Cannon, Valiz Press. During the 2020 lockdown, she began making a series of stress doodles using cheap markers.
Sundress Publications selected her manuscript I Instruct My Toad How to Write Poetry as a semifinalist for its 2022 Chapbook Contest. In 2023, she received her MFA in poetry from Rutgers University Camden. In 2024, she was a Peter Taylor Fellow with the Kenyon Review Writing Workshops. She is a 2025 winner of the Mendelssohn Chorus of Philadelphia’s Joyful Abundance: Emerging Artist Commissioning Program. Amy Beth is a former Associate Artist with the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice. Currently, she is Fence Magazine’s Steaming (online) visual poetry editor and serves on the board of Blue Stoop, where she helps with educational programming.
Amy Beth Sisson is more than just a prizewinner. She’s a discovery. To honor an accomplishment this thematically rich, intricately conceived, and finely executed, a fully integrated collection that is greater than the sum of its radiant parts, gives Lambda the opportunity not just to reward someone whose contribution had been overlooked, but to introduce a readership to a voice that sounds authentically at ease in conversation with celebrated poets including John Ashbery, Tess Gallagher, Wayne Koestenbaum, and Robert Pinsky. Sisson has mastered her craft sufficiently to conjure a vibrantly conscious human presence. We are lucky to have her.
A Word from Amy Beth Sisson
Thank you judges: last year’s wonderful winner Paul Festa, Kevin Stemmler, and Mary Benjamin for choosing me and saying such kind things about my work. Thank you Julian Shendelman for encouraging me to apply, my thesis advisor Airea D. Matthews, my MFA teachers, Paul Lisicky and Pat Rosal, my family, Alan, Rose, Andy and Jimmy and way too many people than I can list. I treasure my teachers and literary circle and wish I could name you all.
I am glad to get this award from an organisation that is spotlighting LGBTQ+ writers, fighting book banning, and striving to allow queer works to shine in the world. This effort feels vulnerable and crucial right now when our government is demonizing and endangering our community, especially our trans neighbors.
The J. Michael Samuels prize brings the invisible into view. I am doubly invisible as a queer old hag who is in a loving long-term relationship with a man. Hag is a loaded word. Some of my friends find it harsh, but I like it for its relation to the words witch and hedge. At age 63, I began an MFA program and challenged myself to bring my private writing into public. Thank you, Lambda Literary, for bringing me into the spotlight. Even though I feel more comfortable in light of a soft flickery candle, I am grateful.
I struggle with the idea of an identity label. I like “demisexual.” This term apparently does not mean sexual desire for demigods or even for Demi Moore. For me, desire tends to follow love and I view love as our true job on earth. At times I’ve wondered if I’m queer enough to be in writing spaces like Lambda. When I mentioned this to the poet James Allen Hall, they said, “The more the queerier!” Words to live by!
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