Marie J. Kuda, the Chicago historian, archivist, writer, lecturer and publisher who founded Womanpress and edited the first annotated lesbian bibliography, Women Loving Women, died on October 1, 2016.
Born Marie Jayne Kuda on December 8, 1939, in Chicago, she graduated from DePaul University. Her activism began in the mid-1960s with Mattachine Midwest, where she edited and wrote for the group’s newsletter, and she went on to serve on the City of Chicago’s Committee on Gay and Lesbian Issues and to help organize Gerber/Hart Library, Chicago Lesbian Liberation and other community groups. She wrote for nearly every Chicago LGBT newspaper of the 1960s through the 1990s and spent 16 years on the American Library Association’s Gay and Lesbian Task Force. From 1990 to 1994 she wrote more than 200 reviews for the ALA’s Booklist, the first open lesbian to do so.
Kuda founded Womanpress in 1974, part of the national Women in Print movement, and organized five Lesbian Writers’ Conferences in Chicago between 1974 and 1978, the first gatherings of lesbian writers in the United States. Beginning in the late 1970s she toured with slide lectures on lesbian and gay history and literature, presenting to hundreds of groups across the country.
Women Loving Women (1975) is a select and annotated bibliography of women loving women in literature, published by Womanpress. The Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame credits it as the first annotated lesbian bibliography.
Two Women Revisited (1991) gathers the poetry of Jeannette Foster and Valerie Taylor in an expanded edition from the Edward-William Publishing Company. It grew out of Two Women: The Poetry of Jeannette Howard Foster and Valerie Taylor, the 1976 Womanpress collection that Kuda edited.
Kuda: Gay & Proud, with Tracy Baim, collects Kuda’s selected writings, essays, columns and historical articles, recording her activism, journalism and work preserving Chicago and national LGBTQ+ history over several decades.
Her archive of more than 100,000 documents, letters, buttons, matchbooks and other ephemera was drawn on by the Chicago History Museum and by WTTW for its Out and Proud in Chicago documentary. Much of her correspondence and many of her papers went to the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, and her lesbian poetry collection and materials from the early Lesbian Writers’ Conferences went to the University of Arizona Poetry Center. In 1991 she was inducted into the first class of the Chicago LGBT Hall of Fame.
Complete Bibliography
Nonfiction: Women Loving Women: A Select and Annotated Bibliography of Women Loving Women in Literature (1975, as editor); Kuda: Gay & Proud (with Tracy Baim, collected writings)
Poetry (as editor): Two Women: The Poetry of Jeannette Howard Foster and Valerie Taylor (1976)
Kuda died of complications from multiple illnesses, including heart disease, on October 1, 2016, in Cicero, Illinois. She was 76. She is survived by her companion, Marilyn Blackman, and her cousin Harry Nimmo.