Omotara James’ poetry collection Song of My Softening won at the Lambda Literary Awards 2025 in New York, USA on Sunday, October 5, 2025.
The Lambda Literary Awards, or the “Lammys,” as they are known, are an award of Lambda Literary, the oldest and largest literary arts organization advancing Lesbian, Gay, Trans, and Queer (LGBTQ) literature in the United States. Previous winners include Chinelo Okparanta, Chike Frankie Edozien, Nicole Dennis-Benn, Kacen Callender, Aricka Foreman, Mia McKenzie, Brontez Purnell, Aisha Sabatini Sloan, Da’Shaun Harrison, and John Keene. In 2024, Liv Little, Dr. Zelda Lockhart, Bryan Washington, Toshio Meronek, Miss Major, Charif Shanahan, Michal ‘MJ’ Jones, and James Ijames won in their categories.
For 2025, eighty judges, including literary critics, academics, librarians, students, poets, independent and traditionally published authors, and other avid readers representing a bright and bold spectrum of LGBTQ+ lived experiences, reviewed the 1,339 submitted titles across six months. From the submissions, the shortlists were announced on Thursday, July 31.
On October 5, the winners were revealed at a ceremony in New York, with Omotara James’ collection Song of My Softening winning in the lesbian Poetry category. Omotara is an artist, editor, and educator based in New York City, and her Alice James Books’ published collection comes with the following blurb;
A profound and intersectional text, Song of My Softening is a queer, fat, love song of the interior. A late-bloomer’s coming of age lyric.
This award-winning collection is a study in tenderness, vulnerability and candor. James provides a window into what perseverance looks like, ungilded: a mirror for anyone born into a culture outside of their identity. These poems hum with multitudinous survival.
Each poem is a celebration of sound. Born from revolutionary praise songs of Yoruba culture, Trinidadian Soca and Calypso, British Pop and Punk, American Gospel and R&B, Song of My Softening will sing itself into your soul.
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