Writing alum Eduardo Martinez-Leyva '15 has been awarded the 2025 Lammy Award for LGBTQ+ Poetry for his book Cowboy Park (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024).
Cowboy Park is a series of autobiographical poems that “pierce through to the heart of pain, love, loss, and the ongoing search for salvation—or at least a salve." The poems tell the story of a queer Latinx person born and raised in El Paso and examines themes of masculinity, identity, and the immigrant experience while offering a new perspective on the image of the cowboy.
The Lammy Awards, presented by Lambda Literary, were created in 1989 to garner national visibility for LGBTQ books, which had established a foothold through a nascent network of lesbian and gay publishers and bookstores.
“I am grateful that Cowboy Park won a Lammy Award,” Martinez-Leyva shared. “I feel that now more than ever, queer and BIPOC stories and voices need to be celebrated, heard, and elevated. The DNA of Cowboy Park began during my MFA thesis at Columbia, hoping to broaden perspectives on what it means to grow up on the border—a place that can be both welcoming and, at times, heavily militarized. The themes of the book remain relevant today. I hope that by raising more awareness, readers will gain greater insight into the subject matter.”
Eduardo Martinez-Leyva was born in El Paso, Texas to Mexican immigrants. His work has been published in The Boston Review, Adroit Journal, Frontier Poetry, The Hopkins Review, Best New Poets 2015, among other publications. He has received fellowships from CantoMundo, The Frost Place, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Lambda Literary Foundation.
