Elana Dykewomon Obituary

Elana Dykewomon, an American lesbian activist, author, editor, and teacher has died. She was born on October 11, 1949 and died on August 7, 2022, aged 72. She died about a month to her 73rd birthday.

Dykewomon was born in New York City, and moved to Puerto Rico together with her family when she was eight.

She studied fine art at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, received a B.F.A. in creative writing from the California Institute of Arts, later and her M.F.A. from San Francisco State University. Dykewomon lived in Oakland, California, and taught at her alma mater San Francisco State.

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

Her second novel, They Will Know Me By My Teeth, released two years after her first publication, was published under the name Elana Dykewoman, was a show of her strong commitment to the lesbian community as well as her way of staying true to herself as the book was written such that anyone who read it would known that its author is a lesbian.

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

Dykewomon was also a recipient of numerous awards;

• 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.