Elana Dykewomon

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

Dykewomon lived in Oakland, California, and taught at her alma mater San Francisco State. She was married to Susan Levinkind until her death from Lewy body dementia in 2016.

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

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."

In 1997, Beyond the Pale won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and the Ferro-Grumley Award for lesbian fiction.

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"

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.

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."

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."

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

Elana Dykewomon (née Nachman; 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.