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Donna Minkowitz is a writer of fiction and memoir who author Mary Gaitskill has celebrated as “original, energetic, witty, and meaty.” Andrew Solomon dubbed her “utterly entrancing… a writer with breathtakingly fluent language.”

DONNAVILLE, her first novel, will be out in October 2024 from Indolent Books.

Preorders are available right here.

If you see that map at the top of this website, it’s a map of Donnaville!

DONNAVILLE is set in “the city of Donna’s mind,” where all the characters except her partner and a “tourist” character are parts of her.

The city is outwardly verdant and pleasant — attractive to visitors — but it also has a hidden, central prison. Some of the characters run the prison, and others are hoping to burn the place down. (Still other characters, of course, are incarcerated there.) And yes, all these characters are parts of her.

Minkowitz is also the author of the fantasy-influenced memoir Growing Up Golem 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.