Jes Battis is a 2025 Lammy Award Finalist
We are thrilled to announce that Jes Battis’ I Hate Parties is a finalist for the 2024 Lammy Awards in the LGBTQ+ Poetry category. The virtual ceremony to announce winners will take place Saturday, October 4, 2025.
Social anxiety runs through I Hate Parties like a current. Recorded on deliberately shaky media, this collection offers the B-side of growing up queer, autistic and nonbinary. From Scruff dates to mix tapes, Jes Battis cruises (and crashes) through wild feelings and minor catastrophes. Dipping readers into a world of missed connections, social disasters and life as a queer party that constantly surprises, Battis uses a light touch and neurodiverse prosody as they chronicle middle-grade queerness and a kind of meandering surreality. From difficult desires, panic attacks and environmental sensitivities, Battis weaves nineties metaphors with current discussions of neurodiversity and trans rights in Canada as they ruminate between past and present like a cat refusing to settle. I Hate Parties guides us through all the best and worst parties of our lives—to the secret room beyond, where being awkward is the one and only dress code.
“‘I want to leave, / and also stay,’ writes Jes Battis, but I found myself only wanting to stay, to nestle deeper into these pages with their glitzy Olympic figure skating and Days of Our Lives devil possessions, where Middle English meets Drag Race, and Homeric epithets abound on TikTok. I Hate Parties is as wildly entertaining as it is deeply felt. I wish this book had existed when I was a young, small-town queer.”
—Kayla Czaga, author of Midway
Jes Battis (they/them) teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Regina. They’ve published poems in The Ex-Puritan, The Malahat Review, The Capilano Review and Poetry Is Dead, among other literary magazines. They’ve also published creative nonfiction in The Los Angeles Review of Books and Strange Horizons. They are the author of the Occult Special Investigator series (shortlisted for the Sunburst Award), the Parallel Parks series and, most recently, The Winter Knight with ECW.
The Lambda Literary Awards (fondly known as the Lammys) 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. Today, the Lammys celebrate more than 150 LGBTQ writers across 26 categories spanning a number of genres, lived identities, and experiences.