Lesléa Newman (1955 - )

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Heather Has Two Mommies by Lesléa Newman, Diana Souza (Illustrator)

This handsome 10-anniversary edition of a minor classic presents the story of Heather, a preschooler with two moms who discovers that some of her friends have very different sorts of families. Juan, for example, has a mommy and a daddy and a big brother named Carlos. Miriam has a mommy and a baby sister. And Joshua has a mommy, a daddy, and a stepdaddy. Their teacher Molly encourages the children to draw pictures of their families, and reassures them that "each family is special" and that "the most important thing about a family is that all the people in it love each other." In the afterword, the author (whose other children's books include Matzo Ball Moon) explains that although she grew up in a Jewish home, in a Jewish neighborhood, there were no families like hers on the television or in picture books. She came to regard her family as somehow "wrong," since there was no Christmas tree in the living room and no Easter egg hunt. Whatever the religious right may wish to think about nontraditional families, there is no denying that any child enrolled in an American school will encounter friends with single parents, gay parents, stepparents, or adoptive parents. This new, revised version of Heather Has Two Mommies offers an enjoyable, upbeat, age-appropriate introduction to the idea of family diversity. The book is essential for children (ages 2 to 6) with gay parents or family members, and a great addition to a Rainbow Curriculum. --Regina Marler

Girls Will Be Girls by Lesléa Newman

The 11 short stories and one novella in Girls Will Be Girls may satisfy, for the moment, Leslea Newman's large, enthusiastic readership, who will relish her arch humor in stories like "Eggs McMenopause," in which a woman of a certain age decides that the only way she can grasp the fact of her many shed eggs is by buying several hundred chicken eggs at the grocery store, a few dozen at a time, and distributing them around her small apartment. In the titular novella, Newman turns her attention to infidelity, hovering between the comic and the tragic as she describes the breakdown of a long and stable (read: static and dull) relationship between Gwen, a therapist, and her artist girlfriend, Didi, who "couldn't have asked for a more considerate lover. No, what she wanted was a less considerate lover.... A lover who didn't care if her teeth were brushed or if she was going to rip Didi's dress or ruin her brand new manicure." What happens when Gwen's handsome new client gets a look at Didi comes as no surprise, but Gwen's quirky revenge will keep the pages turning. --Regina Marler

Pillow Talk II : More Lesbian Stories Between the Covers by Lesléa Newman (Editor)

The stories in this second volume of the Pillow Talk series could be a lot worse and still be fairly effective as erotica. As it happens, most of them are well crafted and appropriately evocative, with an emphasis on crossing boundaries. In J.L. Belrose's "Tyger! Tyger!" a free-spirited lover liberates her girlfriend from a hopeless relationship with her disapproving mother. In tatiana de la tierra's "Eye of the Hurricane," the stone butch Sirena barricades herself into a Florida apartment with her femme lover Julieta, giving Julieta what may be one final present before the storm overtakes them. Often the most successful of these tales present classic fantasy material. The working-class butch heroine of Lisa Gonzales's "Uncommon Janitors in Lust" finds herself writhing on the desk of a brainy and gorgeous white-collar worker who can also talk about football and car repair. One quick glance at a beautiful black woman on a crowded New York City subway, and the protagonist of Rosalind Christine Lloyd's "subway ride 4 play" manages to invite an unconventional encounter that leaves them both trembling and disheveled. Fully living up to the promise of Pillow Talk , these stories merit a place on the bedside table beside the Herotica series and Cleis Press's Best Women's Erotica. Anyone who still assumes that lesbian erotica is tame or badly written is now seriously out of touch. --Regina Marler

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Lesléa Newman

Lesléa Newman is an author and editor with thirty books to her credit including "Heather Has Two Mommies", "A Letter To Harvey Milk", "Writing From The Heart", "In Every Laugh a Tear", "The Femme Mystique", "Still Life with Buddy", "Fat Chance" and "Out of the Closet and Nothing to Wear".
 
She has received many literary awards including Poetry Fellowships from the Massachusetts Artists Fellowship Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Highlights for Children Fiction Writing Award, the James Baldwin Award for Cultural Achievement, and two Pushcart Prize Nominations. Five of her books have been Lambda Literary Award Finalists.

Ms. Newman wrote "Heather Has Two Mommies", the first children's book to portray lesbian families in a positive way, and has followed up this pioneering work with several more children's books on lesbian and gay families: "Gloria Goes To Gay Pride", "Belinda's Bouquet", "Too Far Away to Touch", and "Saturday Is Pattyday".
 
She is also the author of many books for adults that deal with lesbian identity, Jewish identity and the intersection and collision between the two. Other topics Ms. Newman explores include AIDS, eating disorders, butch/femme relationships and sexual abuse. Her award-winning short story, "A Letter To Harvey Milk" has been made into a film and adapted for the stage.
 
In addition to being an author, Ms. Newman is a popular guest lecturer, and has spoken on college campuses across the country including Harvard University, Yale University, the University of Oregon, Bryn Mawr College, Smith College and the University of Judaism.
 
Current projects include a recently completed novel about sexual abuse entitled "Jailbait", and several pictures books including "Runaway Dreidl", "My Name is Aviva", and "Cats, Cats, Cats".

Beatrice Interview

Interviewed by Ron Hogan

Her 1996 anthology My Lover is a Woman (Ballantine) collects poems from several poets. There were no restrictions placed on the material or subject matter. "They wanted a collection of lesbian poems," she says, "and that's what they got," with no compromises for mainstream sensibilities. Newman is pleased with the results, and with the total support that Ballantine has given the project.

Excerpt:

LN: An editor at Ballantine Books thought of the project and asked me if I wanted to do it, which was a great honor, and also slightly terrifying. After preparing a book proposal, which was accepted, I went about selecting poems.

RH: Tell us about your selection process.

LN: What I did was collect poems by writing to poets that I knew who I wanted to have involved. Then I read through all the lesbian poetry that I could find in single- writer collections, anthologies, literary and lesbian magazines, then put out calls for material in lesbian magazines and writers' magazines. After I acquired a big pile of material, I split that into "Yes", "No" and "Maybe" piles.

The open call in magazines swamped me, but I got several writers who had never been collected before, some who had never been published. But it meant reading through literally pounds of poetry...

Newman's reading focuses attention on gay men, AIDS

Elisabeth Sherwin, January 30, 2000

Excerpt:

Leslea Newman gave her first public reading from her new collection of short stories, "Girls Will be Girls...," earlier this month at the Women's Resources and Research Center's writers series.

Newman, a spokeswoman for both the Jewish community and the lesbian community, read three versions of the same story "all of which are true and all of which are different."

She read poetry from "Still Life With Buddy"; "Too Far Away to Touch," a story for children, and a short story from her new collection, "Whatever Happened to Baby Fane?" Each of these readings involved a man dying of AIDS.

"I have lost three friends, all male writers, to AIDS," she said.

The question she is most frequently asked about her work is this: Was that story true? On the one hand, to be asked that question is a compliment, she said, because it indicates that the reader was convinced by the material. On the other hand, the question is somewhat insulting because it denies the writer the strength of her craft...

Names Index:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
| Authors Index | Scholars Index |