I'm delighted to announce that my first full-length poetry book, The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011), recently won a Lambda Literary Award. The "Lammies" are the premier annual international awards for LGBT writing.

While they were announcing the award before mine in Manhattan two weeks ago, a beautiful blonde woman said something to me that I couldn't hear. I didn't realize until she was introduced onstage that she was our own Amy King, moderator of the Goodreads Poetry group! Luckily, I got to shake her hand and thank her when I went onstage to accept my award. What an honor.

The Horizontal Poet is now available on Amazon and at the following fine independent bookstores: The Laurel Bookstore in Oakland, California; The Beat Museum in San Francisco, California; Chaucer's Books in Santa Barbara, California; and Bluestockings in New York City.

You can also order the book directly from its indie publisher Zeitgeist Books at www.zeitgeist-press.com. If you prefer a signed copy, you can order one from me for $14 plus $2 shipping ($16 total) as a check or money order sent to Jan Steckel/PO Box 18797/Oakland, CA 94619, or for $16 sent to me via PayPal to Jmsteckel at aol dot com. Be sure to include your mailing address and to whom you want the book signed.

The cocktail reception before the Lambda Literary Awards Ceremony was a gas. I knew I should be running around trying to meet publishers or agents, but I was mesmerized by all the different sparkly eyeliners people were wearing. I got interviewed for some sort of promotional video for the Lambda Literary Foundation and tried to say all the right things.

Just before the awards ceremony started, someone kicked my husband out of his seat in the auditorium so Kate Millett could sit in it. Of course, he was happy to give it to her. I lay on the floor in a little alcove to the left of the stage where they had put me, and nearly got tripped over by Armistead Maupin. Kate Clinton shook my hand, and I decided never to wash it again. In her remarks, she said that the Republicans wanted to shrink government down small enough to fit inside her uterus.

When they announced that The Horizontal Poet had won an award, I swore softly to myself in shock and mounted the stairs to the stage. They had projected a thirty foot image of the book's cover on a screen behind me, so there I was stammering in front of a Brobdingnagian image of my seminude buxom self while four hundred people applauded. Except now I'm forty pounds lighter and have chopped off my hair, so I looked like a skinny-assed white boy in a black leather jacket and glasses. It was kind of like one of those dreams where you forget to wear any clothes to school.

I thanked all the requisite people and staggered off the stage into the arms of a six-foot-tall Olympian goddess, her bare shoulders rising from her brocade peplum bodice like Venus on the half-shell: my heroine Susie Bright. Then a long clinch with my husband Hew. The rest of the program had an air of unreality, but since the bisexuals and the transgendered people usually come last at queer events, there wasn't too long to wait. Then tons of hugs, congratulations, photos, handshakes, more awkward thanks, and into the cool night air.

I have two bags full of swag, mostly books by other queer writers that I'm really looking forward to reading. I have an enormously dense hunk of glass in the shape of a book, engraved with the relevant particulars. If I ever win another of these, I can use them for bookends. I have the knowledge that I really moved those judges with words on a page, without any junkets or publicist or connections. I know what my beautiful hunk of glass is. It's a license to write.