Ariel Gore

Ariel Gore (born June 25, 1970) is a Lambda Award-winning editor, author, and teacher. Gore has authored more than 13 books including novels and experimental memoirs. Gore's fiction and nonfiction work also explores creativity, spirituality, queer culture, and positive psychology. She is the founding editor/publisher of Hip Mama, an Alternative Press Award-winning publication covering the culture and politics of motherhood. Through her work on Hip Mama, Gore is widely credited with launching maternal feminism and the contemporary mothers' movement.

Her anthology Portland Queer: Tales of the Rose City won the best "LGBT anthology" at the 22nd annual Lambda Literary Award in 2010.

Early life and education Ariel Gore was born June 25, 1970, in Carmel, California. Her mother, Eve de Bona, was the subject of her book The End of Eve (2014). Her stepfather, John Duryea, was a priest who had been excommunicated in 1976 by the Catholic Church when he confessed in a sermon that he had fallen in love with Gore's mother. Gore was raised in Palo Alto, California and attended Addison Elementary School, Jordan Middle School (renamed to Greene Middle School) and two years at Palo Alto High School. She left high school at age 15 by taking the California High School Proficiency Test.

Work

Hip Mama The first issue of Hip Mama was published in December, 1993, in Oakland, California as part of Gore's senior project while attending Mills College. Published quarterly, the magazine relocated to Portland, Oregon in the 1990s. It was created as a forum for single, urban, and feminist mothers.

Atlas of the Human Heart (1998) Her lyrical memoir, Atlas of the Human Heart, recounts Gore's teenage years and her travels. This book was a 2004 finalist for the Oregon Book Award.

Teaching She has taught as a faculty fellow at The Attic Institute of Arts and Letters in Portland, Oregon, University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe. She currently teaches at Ariel Gore's School for Wayward Writers (or The Literary Kitchen). After living in Portland, Oregon for many years, Gore and her family moved to Oakland, California in approximately 2014 and lived there for 3 years before moving to New Mexico. The family moved back to Oakland in 2024.

Gore's daughter, Maia Swift, is an artist and art director based in Brooklyn. She previously worked as an art director for her mother's Hip Mama magazine and helped her co-author Whatever, Mom: Hip Mama's Guide to Raising a Teenager (2004).

Gore was married to chef Deena Chafetz from 2013 until Chafetz's death from metastatic breast cancer in 2023.