March is Women’s History Month, and this year we are celebrating by launching a new feature, “Remembering Lesbians,” a page for stories about Southern lesbians we have lost and who are not forgotten.
We have already published remembrances of writers Shay Youngblood, Terri Lynn Jewell; novelist and publisher June Arnold; disability rights activist Betty Bird; as well as an interview with the Herstory Project’s own writer and oral historian, Barbara Esrig.
At the end of 2024, within scarcely a month, we lost three significant Southern lesbian writers. Bestselling novelist Dorothy Allison died in California on November 5, 2024, age 75; poet doris davenport (who preferred her name lowercase) died in Georgia on December 2, 2024, age 75; and renowned “poet and provocateur,” Nikki Giovanni, died in Virginia on December 9, 2024, age 81. All three died of cancer.
Southern scholar and antiracism author Mab Segrest remembers her friend Dorothy Allison with a personal story of her last conversations with Allison. Poet doris davenport is remembered by one of her younger sisters, Maggie Davenport. Our Nikki Giovanni remembrance comes from Winn, who met the poet in 2021 when Giovanni spoke in Birmingham, “the Tragic City,” where Giovanni would not have been allowed to speak when she began her activism with the American Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s.
Read about them at She Who Will Be Remembered.
NOTE: If you would like to write a remembrance, please send it to us by email at:
slfaherstoryproject@gmail.com
