Professors Hasanthika Sirisena and Gila Ashtor '20 Named Finalists for Lambda Literary Awards
Lambda Literary recently announced the 2022 finalists for the Lambda Literary Awards. Assistant Professor Hasanthika Sirisena was named a finalist in the category Bisexual Nonfiction for Dark Tourist (Mad Creek Books, 2021). Assistant Professor and alumna Gila Ashtor '20 was named a finalist in the category LGBTQ Studies for Homo Psyche (Fordham University Press, 2021).
Founded in 1989, Lambda Literary is a nonprofit organization that champions LGBTQ books and authors. Besides the annual Lambda Literary Awards, the organization also holds a Writers Retreat for emerging LGBTQ voices, hosts an annual literary festival, and compiles the Lambda Book Report, which publishes book reviews, interviews, and industry news. The Lambda Literary Awards were created in 1989 to garner national visibility for LGBTQ books and now celebrates writers across 24 categories.
Dark Tourist by Sirisena is a book of essays that explores the ways in which personal identity and the riptides of history meet: "the 1961 plane crash that left a nuclear warhead buried near her North Carolina hometown, juxtaposed with reflections on her father’s stroke. A visit to Jaffna in Sri Lanka—the country of her birth, yet where she is unmistakably a foreigner—to view sites from the recent civil war, already layered over with the narratives of the victors." Sirisena's essays piece together memoir, reportage, and cultural criticism to understand the sometimes-fractured self within the resonances of language, love, family, sex, art, and history.
Sirisena's work has been anthologized in This is the Place (Seal Press, 2017), in Every Day People: The Color of Life (Atria Books, 2018), and twice named a notable story by Best American Short Stories. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo and is a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award recipient. Her short story collection, The Other One, won the Juniper Prize and was released in 2016 by the University of Massachusetts Press.
Homo Psyche by Ashtor, a finalist for the category LGBTQ Studies, explores how queer theory would benefit from further exploration of how psychology has shaped the field. Through close readings of key thinkers, including Eve Kosofsky Sedwick, Leo Bersani, and Lee Edelman, Ashtor demonstrates why metapsychology should serve as a new dimension of analysis within the fields of queer critical thought.
Ashtor is a critical theorist, psychoanalyst, and writer. She is also the author of an experimental memoir, Aural History (Punctum, 2020) and a book of clinical theory, Exigent Psychoanalysis: The Interventions of Jean Laplanche (Routledge, 2021). She trained at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) in New York City and is an editor at Studies in Gender and Sexuality. Her primary areas of academic and clinical expertise are trauma and grief, affective disorders, identity, and sexuality.
The winners of the 2022 Lambda Literary Awards will be announced at a virtual awards ceremony on June 11, 2022.