Trivia

Her 1988 collection of short stories, Trash, won two Lambda Literary Awards, for Best Small Press book and Best Lesbian book, in 1989.

With her partner Alix Layman, a printer who plays trombone in an all-women's swing band, she has a son, Wolf Michael.

Legally blind in one eye.

Her influences include Flannery O'Connor, James Baldwin, Jewelle Gomez, Toni Morrison, Bertha Harris and Audre Lorde.

In Fall 2009 she was The McGee Professor and writer in residence at Davidson College, in North Carolina.

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.

In 2018 she received the Trailblazer Award from the Golden Crown Literary Society.

Founding manager of Herstore Feminist Bookstore in Tallahassee, Florida.

In 1998 she founded The Independent Spirit Award to support writers who help sustain small presses and independent bookstores.

In 2006 she was the writer in residence at Columbia College in Chicago.

In 2007 she was elected to the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

In 2019, the Alice B Readers Appreciation Committee of The Alice B Readers Award bestowed the coveted Alice B Medal and honorarium upon her and the Thomas Wolfe Prize.

During Spring 2007 she was Emory University Center for Humanistic Inquiry's Distinguished Visiting Professor.

In 2007 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.

Held a three-month residency at Emory University in Atlanta in 2008 as the Bill and Carol Fox Center Distinguished Visiting Professor.

In 1967 she attended Florida Presbyterian College (now Eckerd College) on a National Merit scholarship. She graduated in 1971 with a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology.

In the Summer of 2007 she was Famosa in residence at Macondo in San Antonio, Texas.

Sexually abused by her stepfather for many years.

From 1973 to 1974 she was the editor of the feminist magazine Amazing Grace, in Tallahassee, Florida.

She and Jo Arnone co-founded the Lesbian Sex Mafia in 1981, the "oldest continuously running women's BDSM support and education group in the country".

Born to Ruth Gibson when she was 15 years old. Her father died when she was a baby.