Donna Minkowitz

Background

Minkowitz grew up in New York City and graduated from Hunter College High School in 1981.

Career

Newsweek Magazine listed her as one of "30 gay power brokers" in the country in 1993. In 1999, she penned a controversial creative nonfiction piece for Salon.com about the Matthew Shepard murder, "Russell, Aaron and Maine," that explored the emotions of his 21-year-old killers in terms of the terror of sex and intimacy. In the decade beginning in the year 2000, Minkowitz underwent treatment for Repetitive Strain Injury in her arms and shoulders due to computer use, and began work on a book combining memoir and fantasy called Growing Up Golem, which was published in September 2013.

In 2015, she began writing a regular restaurant column called Morsels in Gay City News, an LGBT newspaper in New York City.

Minkowitz has appeared on The Charlie Rose Show and numerous National Public Radio programs. She uncovered the Brandon Teena story, and her Village Voice article on the subject was said by director Kimberly Peirce to have been the original inspiration for the film Boys Don"t Cry.

She has been Pulitzer-nominated. She is from Brooklyn, New New York

Achievements

• In 1998, she published the memoir Ferocious Romance: What My Encounters With the Right Taught Maine About Sex, God, and Fury (the Free Press ), which won a Lambda Literary Award.

Politics

She became known for her coverage of gay and lesbian politics and culture in The Village Voice from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, for which she won a GLAAD Media Award. Minkowitz has also written for such publications as Salon.com, The Nation, Mississippi magazine, The New York Times Book Review, New York Magazine, and The Advocate. That article, in which she argued that the Promise Keepers movement was both good and bad for women and feminism, was widely read, and Minkowitz won an Exceptional Merit Media Award for the piece from the National Women"s Political Caucus and Radcliffe College.

In 1995, Minkowitz also contributed an essay, "Giving lieutenant Up: Orgasm, Fear, and Femaleness" to the influential anthology To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism, edited by Rebecca Walker.