Elana Dykewomon

Elana Dykewomon (October 11, 1949 – August 7, 2022) was an American lesbian activist, author, editor, and teacher.

She was a recipient of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction.

Dykewomon was born Elana Michelle Nachman in Manhattan to middle class Jewish parents; her mother was a researcher and librarian, and her father was a lawyer.

She was raised in a Zionist household, and her father fought in Israel's War of Independence.

She and her family moved from Long Island, New York to Puerto Rico when she was eight.

Dykewomon had a difficult childhood as she struggled with her sexuality and frequently fought with her parents.

She recalled being molested by a worker at the local San Juan hotel.

At around 11 or 12, she attempted suicide and was consequently sent to a residential center in New York for treatment then later to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore because of another attempt.

In her later teen years, she lived in a halfway house and attended various boarding schools, including Windsor Mountain School.

In the 1970s, Dykewomon moved to Coos Bay, Oregon, before settling in Oakland, California in the 1980s.

In Oakland, she worked as a typesetter and taught in the English and the Women and Gender Studies departments at her alma mater San Francisco State.

Dykewomon was involved with the San Francisco Dyke March for over eight years.

She studied fine art at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in creative writing from the California Institute of Arts in 1971, and her Master of Fine Arts from San Francisco State University in 1997.

In 1974, Dykewomon published her first novel, Riverfinger Women, under her name of birth, Elana Nachman.

Her 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."

She also considered her name change an attempt to distance herself from the Nachman line of rabbis, and traditional literary culture, noting that "if I called myself Dykewomon, I would never get reviewed in the New York Times".

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."

From 1987 to 1995, Dykewomon edited Sinister Wisdom, an international lesbian feminist journal of literature, art and politics, as well as contributing articles herself.

She also contributed regularly to several other lesbian periodicals, including Common Lives/Lesbian Lives.

She was also a regular contributor to Bridges, a magazine of writing by Jewish women.

She was married to Susan Levinkind from 1988 until her death from Lewy body dementia in 2016.

Dykewomon died of esophageal cancer at her home on August 7, 2022, aged 72, shortly before she was to view the Bay Area Playwrights Festival's live-streamed reading of How to Let Your Partner Die, a play she had written about Levenkind's illness and death.

Prose

Poetry

In the 1989 anthology of writing by Jewish women, The Tribe of Dina, Dykewomon describes herself as "a Lesbian Separatist, descendant of the Baal Shem Tov, typesetter, ...poet"

In 1997, Dykewomon published Beyond the Pale: A Novel, which followed two Jewish lesbians' migration from Russia to the Lower East Side in New York.

The historical fiction novel included a depiction of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, as well as Russian pogroms, the U.S. suffrage movement, and midwifery practices in the early 20th century.

In 1998, 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.

Dykewomon was awarded the Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists' Prize by the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival in 2009.

After graduating from the California Institute of Art, Dykewomon moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, where she was involved with the Valley Women's Center and lesbian separatist projects.

In Northampton, she helped found Megaera Press, a lesbian publishing house, as well as the Women's Film Coop.

Beyond the Pale was republished in 2013, and considered a classic of the lesbian fiction genre.

The novel served as Dykewomon's master's thesis at San Francisco State University, requiring her to study Yiddish, the Torah, and the Talmud.

Maxine Chernoff served as her thesis advisor.

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."