Nisa Donnelly, the author of the Lambda Literary Award-winning lesbian fiction The Bar Stories: A Novel After All, died on January 30, 2021.
Born Lisa Beck on November 11, 1950, in Canton, Illinois, to Virginia and Luther Beck, she wrote as Nisa Donnelly and was known to many as Lisa Donnelly.
The Bar Stories: A Novel After All (1989) is a novel told in linked stories set around a women’s bar in the San Francisco Bay Area, where women who love women come to celebrate, grieve and dream. It offers a panoramic view of the lesbian nation and celebrates lesbian survival in a world more often hostile than tolerant. The book won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction at the second annual Lambda Literary Awards in 1990.
The Love Songs of Phoenix Bay (1994) follows Phoenix Bay, adrift in a world she has stopped trying to understand, as she moves in with her oldest friend Rennie Johnson, a gay man fighting AIDS. When Rennie’s sister Cecile arrives, running from her own past, the three build a family and a home.
Mom: Candid Memoirs by Lesbians About the First Woman in Their Life (1998), which Donnelly edited, collects essays, memoirs and poems on the bond between mothers and their lesbian daughters. Contributors include Linda Smukler, Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Kitty Tsui, Judy Grahn and Donna Allegra. The anthology shared the Lambda Literary Award for Anthologies/Non-Fiction at the 11th annual awards in 1999.
Donnelly also contributed to other anthologies in the collection, including Women On Women 2, Queer View Mirror, Butch/Femme (an essay on being femme), Heatwave Women in Love and Lust, Portraits of Love (“Mazie’s Woman”), Hot & Bothered and Lesbian Travels (“Dear Diary: We Should’ve Stayed Home”).
Complete Bibliography
Novels: The Bar Stories: A Novel After All (1989), The Love Songs of Phoenix Bay (1994)
Edited anthologies: Mom: Candid Memoirs by Lesbians About the First Woman in Their Life (1998)
Contributions to anthologies: Sister and Brother: Lesbians and Gay Men Write About Their Lives Together, edited by Joan Nestle and John Preston (1994), including the essay “Faggots as Animus”; Women On Women 2; Queer View Mirror; Butch/Femme; Heatwave Women in Love and Lust; Portraits of Love; Hot & Bothered; Lesbian Travels
Donnelly died on January 30, 2021, in Portland, Oregon, where she had moved after the death of her wife, Denise, in April 2020. She was 70. She had been a longtime resident of Igo, California.