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Donna Minkowitz is a writer of fantasy, memoir, and journalism who author Mary Gaitskill has celebrated as “original, energetic, witty, and meaty.” Andrew Solomon dubbed her “utterly entrancing… a writer with breathtakingly fluent language.”
GROWING UP GOLEM, her second memoir, was recently republished after 13 years by Indolent Books.
You can pick one up right here.
The estimable lesbian critic and poet Julie Enszer said of the book, “Minkowitz presents herself as a golem, created and controlled by her wacky, needy, and sexually abusive mother.… The quest of the book is Minkowitz’s transformation from golem to human; she desires, secretly to be a servant no longer for her mother, her sister, or the women she dates. Through their quest, Minkowitz explores her early life with the requisite wry humor that makes the book highly, even compulsively readable.… Emotional complexity, fierce imagination and compelling prose.”
The Hugo and Nebula Award-winning science-fiction author Terry Bisson said, “Rich and wild, dark and funny, as fearless as her legendary journalism and as scary as a fairy tale. A serious writer at the top of her game. I love this book!”
“In Growing Up Golem,” the late novelist Ellis Avery said, “Donna Minkowitz comes to the unlikely, brilliant conclusion that she must have been her mother’s golem, a manikin formed from clay and garbage and sacred letters… Exciting, startlingly fresh. Donna Minkowitz takes a dazzling leap of fancy and then writes a new bridge into being behind her for the rest of us to follow.”
Minkowitz is also the author of the novel DONNAVILLE and the memoir Ferocious Romance, about being an openly lesbian reporter covering the Christian right undercover. Growing Up Golem was a finalist for both a Lambda Literary Award and for the Publishing Triangle’s Judy Grahn Nonfiction Award, and Ferocious Romance won a Lambda Literary Award. Donna, a former columnist for the Village Voice and The Advocate, has also written for the New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Salon, Slate, and New York magazine.
Currently, Donna writes a Substack called Rough Tongue, which she describes as “personal, leftist, urgent, emotional essays.” You can check it out here: roughtongue.substack.com.
She is a longtime teacher of memoir writing, a writing coach, a journalist, a radical activist, and the happy originator of the literary open mic series called Lit Lit. You can find out more about her here. Feel free to reach out to her at minkowitz46 AT Gmail.com.