Lamda Literary Foundation kicks off their new website by talking to seven different YA experts, including SFWA member and Andre Norton nominee Malinda Lo.

March 1st, 2010; Los Angeles, CA – Today the Lambda Literary Foundation announced the launch of a new online webzine and blog community for LGBTQ writers and readers. The new Lambda Literary webzine will aggregate the best links from LGBTQ and mainstream book news websites and newspapers, feature provocative interviews, under-reported stories, and thoughtful, of-the-moment book reviews and nurture a social community that comments, critiques, links back, twitters, blogs, and interacts both online and in person.

“We’re here; we’re queer; we read. And on March 1st, we’ll be even more visible to the world and to each other.” says Lambda Literary Foundation board member Nicola Griffith. “We’re a community that loves books. We need books. All kinds of books: yaoi and high lit, graphic novels and celebrity tell-alls, heart-wrenching memoir and YA fantasy. We read to save our lives. We write, we edit. We publish, distribute, review, sell, advertise, lend, and buy. And Lambda Literary will now be home for the whole of the brilliantly diverse community that creates and supports our literature.”

“Our goal is to celebrate the successes and triumphs of our book community,” says Lambda Literary Foundation Web Producer Antonio Gonzalez. “All of it: the L, the G, the B, and the T. But of course we still want to have fun with it.”

Lambda Literary Foundation Executive Director Tony Valenzuela agrees. “Not enough queer readers know about the breadth of LGBT books available, both classic and contemporary in every genre imaginable. It’s our job at Lambda Literary to let them know.”

A core team (Griffith in Seattle, Gonzalez in New York, Valenzuela in Los Angeles, and Karina Meléndez, webdev wizard and designer, in British Columbia) built a six-figure website on a four-figure budget.

“We’ve never met,” says Griffith. “We speak different languages (in more ways than one). But we made this website happen, soup to nuts, in six weeks. We built it with love and care and attention–and not much sleep–because it matters.”

Meléndez is passionate on the subject. “Gabriel Celaya wrote that ‘poetry is a weapon loaded with future.’ When I was a teenager, Nicola Griffith’s books gave me exactly what I needed to stay alive in a highly toxic and homophobic environment. I think it is unlikely that news about Ammonite would have reached me in Mexico had the novel not won a Lambda Award in 1993. Sixteen years later, when Nicola told me, ‘I want people to know that, no matter who or where they are, there’s a book for them,’ I had no choice but to participate in making the vision of a website for all of us a reality.”

Some of the stories the new webzine will be launching with:

• Cheryl Morgan asks the soul-searching question, “Is There, or Should There Be, Such a Thing as Trans Literature?”
• As part of an ongoing Adaptation series, Stephen Rydman takes Tom Ford to task for old-school gay suicidal ideation in A Single Man, and asks: is the film more autobiography than adaptation?
• Susan Stinson ponders what happens when lesbian writers venture into forbidden territory. It’s okay for lesbians to write about lesbians–but can a lesbian really write about 18th century Calvinist minister, Jonathan Edwards? Stinson thinks she can
• Ten experts give ten quotes on the state of queer teen lit.  Young adult fiction with LGBTQ characters and themes is huge in ‘mainstream’ YA circles. We asked ten writers to give us the skinny.

Lambda Literary Foundation’s new webzine can be found at lambdaliterary.org.

About Lambda Literary Foundation
The Lambda Literary Foundation nurtures, celebrates, and preserves LGBT literature through programs that honor excellence, promote visibility and encourage development of emerging writers. LLF’s programs include: the Lambda Literary Awards, the Writers’ Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices, and our website, www.LambdaLiterary.org.