Elana Michelle Nachman was born on October 11, 1949, to Harvey and Rachel Nachman in Manhattan, New York. She was the first of three children, elder sister to two younger brothers, Daniel and David. Her father, Harvey, was an attorney and her mother, Rachel (Weisberger), a researcher for Life magazine. Elana’s parents were fiercely Zionist. Her father served in the United States Army during World War II and then volunteered as a pilot in the Arab-Israeli War in 1948; her mother “helped smuggle arms to Israel,” according to Dykewomon’s obituary in the New York Times. As an adult, Elana disagreed deeply with her parents about Zionism and supported Palestinian liberation. In 1958, the Nachman family moved to Puerto Rico where her father opened a legal practice and her mother began working as a librarian.

After the family’s move, young Elana struggled. She explains: “In the early sixties, I was one of those adolescent lesbians who, living without any possible role models, decided to kill herself. At twelve and thirteen, I tried fairly seriously, and was locked up for the better part of two years” (Dykewomon, “Changing the World,” 58.) After inpatient treatment, Elana attended a Quaker school, but she was dismissed for being a lesbian. She then enrolled in the Windsor Mountain School, a boarding school in Lenox, Massachusetts. Windsor Mountain, founded by German Jewish refugees in 1944, offered progressive education for a multiracial student body with democratic governance and a commitment to civil rights. She completed her high school diploma there and had her first woman lover, Eva Schocken, who became a lifelong friend and comrade. After graduation in 1967, Elana and Eva left Western Massachusetts to attend Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Elana finished her bachelor’s degree in creative writing at California Institute of the Arts. Later in life she completed a master of fine arts degree from San Francisco State University. Elana’s real education, however, happened in lesbian communities.

After college graduation, Elana moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, because of its nascent lesbian-feminist community. In Northampton, she wrote her first novel and published it using her natal name, Elana Nachman, with the independent feminist press Daughters Publishing Company, Inc. Riverfinger Women (1974) reflects the international, eclectic communalism of 1960s alternate cultures, with drug use, radical politics, and lesbian sex making prominent appearances. Daughters Publishing Company, Inc. advertised Riverfinger Women in the New York Times with a description of it as a “lesbian novel,” the first time those words appeared in the paper of record. Riverfinger Women was widely read by lesbians—and women coming out as lesbians.

While in Northhampton, Elana changed her name, first to Dykewoman in 1975 then to Dykewomon in 1981, completely erasing the presence of man in her name. Jewish lesbian novelist Judith Katz describes seeing Dykewomon in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts in “flannel shirt, newsboy cap” with a “brown quart bottle of Narragansett Black Label beer in hand” and notes that Elana was then “reading remarkable, political, deliciously sexual lesbian-centered poems—everywhere” (Katz, Lambdaliterary.org). 

In addition to writing, Dykewomon was involved with the Valley Women’s Center, was one of the organizers of the Women’s Film Coop, and helped to found Megaera Press, a lesbian publishing house that published her book They Will Know Me By My Teeth (1976). Described by Dykewomon on the title page as “stories and poems of lesbian struggle, celebration, and survival,” They Will Know Me By My Teeth collects stories and poems Dykewomon wrote to inspire dyke revolutions alongside graphics by Laura K. Vera inspired by ancient civilizations; the stories, poems, and graphics center lesbian experiences and invoke “a world wide women’s culture and a world wide war in which women had to arm themselves against men.” Dykewomon printed in the book “to be sold and shared with women only,” a radical statement of lesbian separatism that Sarah Schulman describes as “a welcome and a gift.” Schulman explains, “In a world where lesbians were excluded from everything including family and publishing, I had actually never seen an official (i.e. printed) statement that actually invited me somewhere” (Schulman, Sinister Wisdom, 247). The idea that a book could “be sold and shared with women only” was the first of many invitations by Dykewomon into lesbian communities imagined only for lesbians. 

At the end of the 1970s, Dykewomon left Northhampton and took to the road. One of her first stops was the Pagoda, a lesbian community in Saint Augustine, Florida. There she reconnected with Dolphin Waletzky from Northhampton, who became her intimate partner and beloved friend, and the two traveled the United States together, eventually landing in Coos Bay, Oregon, where they stayed until 1984. 

In addition to her own literary work, Elana founded multiple organizations and was a community builder throughout her adult life. In Oregon, from 1979 through 1984, Elana and Dolphin operated Diaspora Distribution, which distributed lesbian separatist materials. Diaspora, drawing a parallel between Jews and lesbians scattered all over the world, distributed materials by and for lesbians only; Waletzky described it as “the first and only and ever [lesbian distribution company]… in the existence of the world and galaxies that we know of.” Living as “the only Jewish lesbians in southern Oregon for hundreds of miles,” Dykewomon and Waletzky encountered antisemitism; Dykewomon describes the experience in her poem, “fifteen minutes from the kar kare klinic,” which begins “JEWS should not live where I live” (What Can I Ask, 60).  During its six years of operation, Diaspora distributed about a dozen items, including two books that it published (Dykewomon’s collection of poetry, Fragments from Lesbos [1981], and Judy Freespirit’s book, Daddy’s Girl, about incest); a collection of short stories by lesbian writer Jess Wells; and hand-spun wool menstrual pads, pillowcases, and audio tapes.

During her early years in Oregon, Dykewomon wrote multiple pieces significant within an emerging community of Jewish lesbians. Evelyn Torton Beck published Dykewomon’s influential essay, “The Fourth Daughter’s Four Hundred Questions,” in her Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology (1982). This essay chronicles, in Dykewomon’s words, “the questions being a Jewish dyke has put me up against in my life” (Nice Jewish Girls, 148); she writes about experiences in her family and going to shul as a child, encounters with non-Jewish lesbians who “thought it was strange, exotic, and somehow funny to come from the jews” (Nice Jewish Girls., 159), and her visions for Jewish lesbian solidarity. Common Lives/Lesbian Lives published her short story, “The Mezuze Maker,” in 1983. In this story, the narrator fears nuclear annihilation and making mezzuzot “out of driftwood” becomes a form of protection not only for homes but for the natural world (Moon Creek Road, 31). Dykewomon writes, “We could make hundreds of them out of driftwood and give them to everyone, all our friends, and then the bombs couldn’t fall. Because we would all be protected” (Moon Creek Road, 32). In Dykewomon’s imagination, a mezzuzeh becomes in the story an object with which to protect her beloved friends, community, dogs, soft sand, beach, and sea wall. 

In 1986, Dykewomon’s short story “Manna from Heaven” appeared in the lesbian journal Sinister Wisdom’s issue Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women’s Anthology, edited by Irena Klepfisz and Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz. This midrashic story riffs on wandering in the desert and being nourished by “a kind of sticky substance clinging to my fingers...like a pollen, but there were not flowers…it was sweet. I ate it until I was full” (Tribe of Dina, 171). Dykewomon muses on receiving the manna before everyone else, who receive it “about a year later,” and being unable to tell anyone that she had “tasted it before.” This speculative piece links Dykewomon’s Jewish cosmology with her belief in lesbians as central to liberation, to being full and sweet. The Jewish feminist journal Bridges published Dykewomon’s short story “The Vilde Chaya and Civilization” in 1992; in that story Dykewomon writes, “what makes a jewess is a large round mole beneath her left breast. It’s the mark of Lilith, her burning fingertip copping a feel of baby flesh as she flees, driven from our cribs” (Moon Creek Road, 36). These examples demonstrate Dykewomon’s vibrant engagements linking Jewish life and mythology with lesbian and feminist ideas.

Elana and Dolphin moved to Oakland, California, in late 1984; their relationship continued until 1986, but they remained devoted friends after their amorous partnership ended. In 1987, Elana became the editor of Sinister Wisdom, a multicultural lesbian literary magazine founded in 1976 and still publishing today. She assembled around her a cadre of lesbians who edited the journal with her and tended to the myriad  administrative and operational processes it required. To support her cultural work and writing during this period, Dykewomon worked as a night-shift typesetter. 

In 1988, Dykewomon met her beloved Susan Levinkind. The two fell in love and committed their lives to one another and to their political and cultural work; they were together until Levinkind’s death in 2016 from Lewy body dementia. Levinkind volunteered with Sinister Wisdom and supported Dykewomon in her work as editor. In 1995, Dykewomon passed Sinister Wisdom on to the next editors and went back to school to earn her masters of fine arts. With a graduate degree in writing, she worked as a teacher for the next two decades often at San Francisco State University and always organizing and teaching private writing classes for women. During her graduate program, Dykewomon wrote her award-winning novel Beyond the Pale (1997). In it, she realized her visions of synthesizing Jewish and lesbian life through an epic tale of Russian Jews, the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, suffrage, labor activism, and lesbian love. Krug & Schadenberg published the German translation of Beyond the Pale as Sarahs Töchter in 1999. 

A significant strand of Dykewomon’s cultural work made important contributions to lesbian theory. She thought and wrote keenly about the political and material conditions of lesbian lives and was one of the early theorists—and practitioners—of lesbian separatism. Northampton offered a range of opportunities to experiment with lesbian-only communities, from poetry readings to living communities. Life in Oregon, a historic center of lesbian land communities, offered further space to experiment with lesbian community building, as did San Francisco. In all her lesbian community work, Dykewomon valued the power of women-only spaces and the potentiality that lesbian separatism offered. 

Dykewomon also made significant theoretical contributions to fat liberation. Her essay “Traveling Fat” in Shadow on a Tightrope: Writing by Women on Fat Oppression explores experiences about the politics of inclusion and exclusion in a range of feminist, lesbian, and Jewish spaces. In the essay “In Search of the Fabled Fat Woman,” she challenged contemporary feminist novelists to create characters who are “fat women who love their bodies without shame while dealing with the shame that is hurled at them, fat women who are active participants in their communities, whose griefs and pleasures reveal our own psyches.” That challenge remains today. Dykewomon also thought and wrote about chosen families, racial and economic justice, the need for capital for lesbians, and the effects of inherited wealth, among other topics. She was expansive in her theoretical engagements in the world and modeled intersectional thinking about lesbian lives.

What is most notable about her theoretical work is how Dykewomon lived inside these ideas, manifesting them in daily life until she died. She created multiracial editorial collectives at Sinister Wisdom. She organized events that were accessible to people living with disabilities; she challenged antisemitism while advocating for self-determination for Palestinians. She led lesbian writing groups, including one for lesbians with cancer, until the last year of her life, believing in the power of lesbian stories. She was involved with the San Francisco Dyke March for many years, as well as Old Lesbians Organizing for Change. She organized and attended demonstrations of Women in Black and other Middle East peace actions. She organized and participated in a local fat swim. Dykewomon organized diverse and inclusive lesbian communities throughout her life. From the Lesbian Gardens cultural center in Northampton, Massachusetts, to a lesbian widows support group in Oakland, she knit lesbians together.

In her final will and trust distributing the assets of her estate, Dykewomon left money and property to lesbians, recognizing all the significant relationships in her life regardless of traditional kinship definitions of blood and marriage. She made capital investments in lesbians who nurtured and cared for her and in lesbian organizations; Dykewomon left her home to the Bay Area Lesbian Archives. During her life and after her death, she invested her time, money, and energy in lesbians.

Dykewomon wrote three novels, Riverfinger Women, Beyond the Pale, and Risk; four books of poetry, They Will Know Me By My Teeth (1976), Fragments from Lesbos (1981), Nothing Will Be As Sweet As the Taste: Selected Poems 1974-1994 (1995), and What Can I Ask: New and Selected Poems (2015); a collection of short stories, Moon Creek Road (2003); and a play, How to Let Your Partner Die (2022), about her experiences with her beloved’s death. Dykewomon was a frequent contributor to lesbian-feminist periodicals and her work has been widely anthologized. 

Dykewomon’s work was recognized for its extraordinary contributions in LGBT literary communities in the twenty-first century. Her second novel, Beyond the Pale, won a Lambda Literary Award. In 2004, The Publishing Triangle release a list of 100 Best Lesbian and Gay Novels; Dykewomon’s Riverfinger Women was number 87 on the list. In 2009, Lambda Literary awarded Dykewomon the Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist’s Prize. In 2018, the Golden Crown Literary Society awarded Riverfinger Women the Lee Lynch Classic Award, and Saints and Sinners Literary Festival named her to their hall of fame. Her work has been hardly acknowledged in non-LGBTQ contexts.

Elana Dykewomon died on August 7, 2022, from complications of esophageal cancer. In the weeks leading up to her death, she was surrounded by her beloveds: family, chosen family, and friends. At the time of her death, her play How to Let Your Partner Die was having its first staged reading through the Bay Area Playwrights Festival.  Her gravestone is inscribed with words written by Dolphin:

Elana Dykewomon

Daughter of Rachel

1949-2022

Rabblerouser, Spiritual Jew

Lover of dykes, words, 

The Cosmos

Riverfinger Women. Plainfield, VT: Daughters, Inc., 1974; Tallahassee, FL: Naiad Press, 1992.

They will know me by my teeth: stories and poems of lesbian struggle, celebration, and survival. Northampton, MA: Megaera Press, 1976.

Fragments from Lesbos. Langlois, OR: Diaspora Distribution, 1981.

Nothing Will Be As Sweet As the Taste: Selected Poems 1974-1994. London, UK: Onlywomen Press, 1995.

Beyond the Pale: A Novel. Vancouver, BC: Press Gang Publishers, 1997; London, UK: Onlywomen, 2000, 2009; Vancouver, BC: Raincoast Books, 2003.

Moon Creek Road: Collected Stories. Denver, CO: Spinster Ink Books, 2003.

Risk. Ann Arbor, MI: Bywater Books, 2009.

What Can I Ask: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014. Berkeley, CA: Sinister Wisdom, 2015.