Dorothy Allison

Dorothy Earlene Allison (April 11, 1949 – November 6, 2024) was an American writer whose writing focused on class struggle, sexual abuse, child abuse, feminism, and lesbianism. She was a self-identified femme lesbian. Allison won several Lambda Literary Awards. In 2014, Allison was elected to membership in the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

Early life Dorothy Earlene Allison was born in Greenville, South Carolina, on April 11, 1949, to Ruth Gibson Allison, who was 15 years old at the time. Her father died when she was a baby. Her single mother was poor, working as a waitress and cook. Ruth eventually married, but when Dorothy was five, her stepfather began to abuse her sexually.

When aged about 11, Allison moved with her family to Central Florida. Allison found respite from her family life in school. She said that she became aware of her lesbian sexuality during her early adolescence.

Education Allison was the first of her family to graduate from high school.

In 1967, Allison attended Florida Presbyterian College on a National Merit scholarship. While in college, she joined the women's movement by way of a feminist collective. She credited "militant feminists" for encouraging her decision to write. Also around this time, Allison severed all ties to her family until 1981. She graduated in 1971 with a Bachelor of Arts in anthropology.

Allison subsequently did graduate work in anthropology at Florida State University, the Sagaris Institute, and the New School for Social Research, where she earned a M.A. in urban anthropology in 1981.

Career Allison held a variety of jobs before gaining any success as a writer. From 1973 to 1974, she was the editor of the feminist magazine Amazing Grace, in Tallahassee, Florida. During this time, she was also a founding manager of Herstore Feminist Bookstore in Tallahassee.

Allison's first book of poetry, The Women Who Hate Me, was published with Long Haul Press in 1983. In 1988, her first short story collection, Trash, was published by Firebrand Books.

In 1998, Allison founded The Independent Spirit Award to support writers who help sustain small presses and independent bookstores. The following year, Allison was Emory University Center for Humanistic Inquiry's Distinguished Visiting Professor and Famosa in residence at Macondo in San Antonio, Texas. In 2007, Allison announced that she was working on a new novel entitled She Who, to be published by Riverhead Books.

Allison held a three-month residency at Emory University in Atlanta in 2008 as the Bill and Carol Fox Center Distinguished Visiting Professor. Grué also notes Allison's ability "to make [lesbian] desire and pleasure public" in her writing, in contrast to the second-wave feminist views on "correct expressions" of sexuality. Flannery O'Connor, James Baldwin, Jewelle Gomez, Toni Morrison, Bertha Harris, and Audre Lorde. In the early 1980s, Allison met Lorde at a poetry reading. After reading what would eventually become her short story "River of Names", Lorde approached her and told her that she simply must write.

Activism Allison said that the early feminist movement changed her life. "It was like opening your eyes under water. It hurt, but suddenly everything that had been dark and mysterious became visible and open to change." However, she admitted that she would never have begun to publish her stories if she had not gotten over her prejudices, and started talking to her mother and sisters again. She and Jo Arnone cofounded the Lesbian Sex Mafia in 1981, the "oldest continuously running women's BDSM support and education group in the country".

Honors and awards Allison's first novel, the semi-autobiographical Bastard Out of Carolina (1992), was one of five finalists for the 1992 National Book Award. Publishing Triangle named Bastard Out of Carolina one of "The Triangle's 100 Best" novels of the 1990s. In 2007, Allison was elected to the Fellowship of Southern Writers. The same year, she was awarded the Jim Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelists' Prize at the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival, as well as the Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction.

In 2018, Allison received the Trailblazer Award from the Golden Crown Literary Society for being, in the words of Karin Kallmaker, "the original firebrand. She didn't write for approval, she wrote to survive. She is a firebrand, truthteller, and trailblazer." In 2019, the Alice B Readers Appreciation Committee of The Alice B Readers Award bestowed the Alice B Medal and honorarium upon Allison and the Thomas Wolfe Prize. Allison was the 2024 recipient of the Publishing Triangle's Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement. This award celebrated the recipient's lifetime of work and commitment to fostering queer culture. She received a $3,000 prize, one of the largest cash prizes in LGBTQ+ letters.

Personal life and death

Allison later lived in Guerneville, California, calling herself a "happily born-again Californian". She lived with Alix Layman, her partner, and with her son, Wolf Michael.

Layman died in 2022. Allison died of cancer on November 6, 2024. Her death was announced by the Frances Goldin Literary Agency, which represented her.