Alumnus Sam Ross '13 Wins Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry

Alumnus Sam Ross ’13 recently won the 2020 Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry for his book, Company, published last February by Four Way Books.

The Thom Gunn Award is part of an annual award package given by the Publishing Triangle, an association described on their website as “a group of queer folks who work to further the publication of books and other materials written by LGBTQ authors or with LGBTQ themes.” The 2020 awards honor the best LGBTQ fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and trans literature published in 2019.

“The Thom Gunn Award honors Thom Gunn (1929–2004), who was the author of The Man with Night Sweats (1992) and many other acclaimed volumes. Gunn, who was born in Kent, England, lived in San Francisco from 1960 until his death. (In its first four years, including the year Mr. Gunn himself won, this award was known as the Triangle Award for Gay Poetry.)”

The finalists and the winner are determined by a panel of judges appointed by the Publishing Triangle’s awards committee. Starting in the spring of 2018, the winner receives a prize of $1,000; prior to that, winners received $500.

Previous recipients of the Thom Gunn Award include Ocean Vuong, Jericho Brown, and Chen Chen.

Last year, Company won the Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry, selected by 2019’s judge Carl Phillips. Phillips described the book as a “debut both tough and tender, the poems of a man who’s been made to look away from the world plenty, and has found a way to look steadily back.” You can read a poem from the book, “Bowers v. Hardwick” on Four Way Books.

Prior to the pandemic, the winners of the Triangle Awards were to be announced at a ceremony to be held at the New School in New York City. For now, the ceremony is postponed.