Illinois Authors

Firebrand Books, Ithaca, N.Y. : ©1988.

Journalist/jock author tells all about the lesbian national pastime.

Rattling Good Yarns Press 2021

Marya Zhukova is a woman of many passions. Her husband isn’t one of them. It’s mathematics and literature that captivate her, in part, but her lover, Vera, enthralls her most of all. These are, however, all dangerous obsessions in the socially turbulent St. Petersburg of 1875. Marya is the fiery center of a small solar system of characters, each of whom depends on her to light their own lives. There is her aunt Lidia, a spinster who, dying of consumption, exacts from her niece a promise to marry. There is Grigorii, Marya’s one-time math teacher, who longs for his former pupil to achieve the scholarly glory he cannot. There is Vera, a young tutor surprised to find she’s fallen in love with a woman. There is Sergei, an earnest librarian captivated by Marya and willing to do whatever it takes to be near her, even if that means a platonic marriage. But when Sergei is consumed with desire for Marya, his anguish over the promise he made sets in motion a deadly chain of events. St. Petersburg itself adds a richness to these characters as they walk and muse along the city’s canals or bounce along the rutted streets behind a hardy droshky driver on their way to dine at Privato or Leiner’s Deli or to watch ballet at the Marinsky Theater. Inspired by a real-life account, Infraction takes place at a time when women who yearn for more find that freedom comes at a cost.

Terrapin Books 2020

If you've been combing the bookshops for a new collection of poetry that's likely to stimulate the intellect, fine-tune the senses, and simultaneously break the heart, Kissing the Long Face of the Greyhound is the volume you're after. Here, the gifted poet Yvonne Zipter exhibits an astonishing vocabulary, offering insights that perhaps we never realized we'd missed. One stunning example: in an elegiac poem for her beloved dog, she recalls the "sweet slenderness of that languorous / lick of calcium, like an ivory flute." Another: an ekphrastic take on discarded pencils, noting "how quick they are to deny their own musings"-a notion which suggests that virtually all writers and readers of poetry will savor this book.-Marilyn L. Taylor, Poet Laureate of Wisconsin, 2009-2010

Spinsters Ink, Duluth : ©1995.

Snapshots of daily lesbian life and ironic self-portraits from Zipter's syndicated column, Inside Out, plus new sketches on challenging subjects.

Hutchinson House, Chicago : ©1990.

This collection of poems about love and loss was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist and runner-up for the Poetry Society of America's Melville Cane Award.

Kelsay Books 2023

This brilliant collection of poems by Yvonne Zipter is filled with compressed storytelling that speaks both lyrically and narratively to the human spirit’s resiliency. Keenly observant, Zipter writes compassionately and gratefully as she takes readers with her through hardship, loss, and her battle with cancer toward portals of hope. With abundant intelligence and heart, Zipter looks deeply into the darkness while sustaining the possibilities of light. She shows, through flawless writing and rich imagery, that despite whatever life’s challenges may be, there are ways in which fulfillment may be attained. To borrow a line from her concluding poem, this book hums “through the dark hours on a swell of happiness.” —Adele Kenny, Poetry Editor, Tiferet A kind of radical compassion is at work in the poems of Yvonne Zipter’s The Wordless Lullaby of Crickets. It’s not simple good cheer or just some sort of positive spin on life; it’s complex, and it’s always a little—deliciously—ambiguous. One can be, in these poems, “blessed with a trinity / of crows;” one notices a lovely Johnny Hodges saxophone tune returning unbidden in the midst of a round of chemotherapy; and one realizes, then, that one is in the presence of a poet wielding words the way a player plays notes of a sad and somehow uplifting song. —Robert Wrigley, author of The True Account of Myself as a Bird In her third full-length poetry collection, The Wordless Lullaby of Crickets, Yvonne Zipter writes with power and precision about her family, the poets who influenced her, her sexuality, her struggle with cancer, her wife, her favorite jazz music to which she turns again and again, and above all, the consolation of nature, which is, as it was for Emily Dickinson, the encounter with the numinous, perfectly exemplified in the last lines of “The Kestrel:” “all the holy days of our childhoods insignificant / in the single yellow rosary bead of her eye.” —J.R. Solonche, author most recently of Selected Poems 2002-2021