Elana Dykewomon was an American lesbian activist, author, editor, and teacher. She was born on October 11, 1949 and died on August 7, 2022, aged 72. She died about a month to her 73rd birthday.
She was a recipient of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. There are no information on her children, and it is because she didn’t have. She was a lesbian and lesbian activist.
Dykewomon was born in New York City and she published her first novel, Riverfinger Women, under her name of birth, Elana Nachman in 1974.
Dykewomon’s second book, They Will Know Me By My Teeth, released in 1976, was published under the name Elana Dykewoman, “at once an expression of her strong commitment to the lesbian community and a way to keep herself ‘honest,’ since anyone reading the book would know the author was a lesbian.”
Fragments From Lesbos, printed in 1981 “for lesbians only,” was published under the author’s current last name, “Dykewomon,” in order “to avoid etymological connection with men.”
Dykewomon won some awards prior to her death;
- In 1998, her book, Beyond the Pale won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and the Ferro-Grumley Award for lesbian fiction.
- In 2004, Riverfinger Women was selected as #87 in The Publishing Triangle’s list of 100 Best Lesbian and Gay Novels, by a panel of judges that included Dorothy Allison, Samuel R. Delany, Lillian Faderman, M.E. Kerr, Sarah Schulman, and Barbara Smith.
- In 2018, the Golden Crown Literary Society awarded Riverfinger Women with the Lee Lynch Classic Award because it is an “essential part of American literary history, LGBT literature, politics, and popular culture.”
- Dykewomon was awarded the Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists’ Prize by the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in 2009.