Yvonne Zipter, the Chicago poet, columnist and author best known for the poetry collection The Patience of Metal and the lesbian softball study Diamonds Are a Dyke’s Best Friend, died on February 10, 2025.
Zipter was born on January 6, 1954, in Milwaukee, and grew up in West Allis, Wisconsin, graduating from West Allis Central High School in 1972. She earned a bachelor of science degree in psychology from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee in 1976 and later received a master of fine arts degree in writing from Vermont College in 1995. After time in California and New York, she worked as a technical writer at Bell Labs and moved to Chicago in 1981 to take a job at the University of Chicago Press, where she worked as a copywriter and manuscript editor until 2006, freelanced for the press until 2008, and returned as a senior manuscript editor from 2011 to 2018.
In Chicago she became a central figure in lesbian-feminist literary life. She co-founded HOT WIRE: A Journal of Women’s Music and Culture, which took its name from her poem “Finding the Hot Wire,” and the Writers Conference at the National Women’s Music Festival. From 1983 to 1993 she wrote the nationally syndicated column Inside Out, which ran in Outlines, In Step, Philadelphia Gay News, The Weekly News and The Washington Blade. She was inducted into the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame in 1995.
Diamonds Are a Dyke’s Best Friend (1988) is a feminist look at softball as the lesbian national pastime, mixing reflection, reminiscence and reporting from the field.
The Patience of Metal (1990) is a collection of poems about love and loss.
Ransacking the Closet (1995) gathers pieces from her Inside Out column along with new essays, treating subjects from dental dams to Barbie dolls with humor.
The Patience of Metal was a Lambda Literary Award finalist and a runner-up for the Poetry Society of America’s Melville Cane Award. Sections of Ransacking the Closet were an Illinois Arts Council finalist. Late in her career she published the poetry collections Kissing the Long Face of the Greyhound and The Wordless Lullaby of Crickets, and the historical novel Infraction, based on the true story of a Russian woman in the 1870s who loved both mathematics and another woman.
Complete Bibliography
Novels: Infraction (2021)
Poetry: The Patience of Metal (1990), Like Some Bookie God (chapbook), Kissing the Long Face of the Greyhound (2020), The Wordless Lullaby of Crickets (2023)
Nonfiction: Diamonds Are a Dyke’s Best Friend (1988), Ransacking the Closet (1995)
Zipter died of complications from ovarian cancer on February 10, 2025. She was 71. She is survived by her wife, Kathy Forde, whom she married on July 5, 2014, and by her sister, Lori King.