Maida Tilchen

October 22 2009

Maida Tilchen writes primarily to preserve and/or dramatize lesbian history. A lifetime book collector, she co-wrote the first "second wave" article on lesbian pulp novels, published in Margins magazine in 1975. Her writing has been published in Gay Community News; Sojourner; Body Politic, and books including Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology; Lavender Culture; Women-Identified Women; and Feminist Frameworks, and includes the foreword to the bibliography The Lesbian in Literature.

She served as a VISTA volunteer in southern Indiana; was a lesbian activist in Bloomington, Indiana in the 1970s; was promotions manager for Gay Community News (Boston); and had many research and writing jobs in the educational field. Before retiring in 2015, she was the library administrator and research skills instructor for Cambridge College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, serving primarily older minority women and immigrants.

She has visited New Mexico often since 1993. After her first trip there, wanting to continue to live in the library-rich Boston area but to keep one foot in the "land of enchantment," she started writing fiction set in New Mexico. Her New Mexico book collection won the 2020 George and Anna Eliot Ticknor Collecting Prize from Boston’s Ticknor Society. Read her winning entry at https://www.ticknor.org/dw3/pdfs-ticknor-awards/Maida-Tilchen-entry-for-Ticknor-Award-2020.pdf).  Her article about her New Mexico book collection was featured in the December, 2020 issue of New Mexico Magazine. Read the article at https://www.newmexicomagazine.org/blog/post/historical-new-mexican-books/

To view a one-hour video interview, go to this link, click “Biographies” near the top of the page; then click “T” in the alphabet line; then click on “Maida Tilchen”
https://www.chicagogayhistory.com/biography.php?id=796