Flower of Iowa

Lance Ringel's Flower of Iowa, a World War I novel about an American soldier and a British soldier who fall in love in 1918 France, received accolades across multiple genres. It was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award (Gay Romance); a Gold Winner of the Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award (War and Military Fiction); the winner of two IBPA Benjamin Franklin Awards (Gold for Romance, and Silver for LGBTQ); and a Bronze Medalist in the IPBA "IPPY" Awards (Military/Wartime Fiction). A staged excerpt from Flower of Iowa also became a Finalist in the New York New Works Theatre Festival.

His Floridian Nights, a novel set against the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic in 1988 that centers around a youthful gay widower who both finds and resists new love with a much younger man, also has been named a Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award (Gay Romance) and for the Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award (Romance).

His play In Love with the Arrow Collar Man, about famed illustrator J.C. Leyendecker and his model, muse and lover Charles Beach, was a Semi-Finalist in the New York New Works Theatre Festival, and went on to successful runs at Theatre 80 St. Marks in New York, and at the Reynolda House Museum of American Art in conjunction with The Little Theatre of Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Flash/Frozen, a drama based on true events about two champion male skaters whose lives fatefully intersect around the tragic 1961 plane crash that killed the entire U.S. Figure Skating World Team, recently concluded a successful premiere run at Theatre Row in New York.

Ringel has written collaboratively for the stage with his spouse of 45 years, Chuck Muckle, on the musical Animal Story; with director John Caird on At Home in the World, a joint musical production of Vassar College and Japan's Ashinaga Foundation; and on Vassar Voices, highlighting 150 years of the college's history, which premiered at Jazz at Lincoln Center, starring Meryl Streep, Lisa Kudrow and Frances Sternhagen.