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Sapphic romance

Katherine V. Forrest

born 1939

Author of Curious Wine and the Kate Delafield mysteries; "a founding mother of lesbian fiction".

Born
1939 · Windsor, Ontario
Nationality
Canadian-born American
  • lesbian romance
  • mystery
  • science fiction
  • editing
  • Naiad Press

A reference author. Valice Press has no connection with Katherine V. Forrest, their publishers or their estate. Katherine V. Forrest appears here as part of the reading context around the shelf.

Biography

The life, briefly

Katherine V. Forrest was born in Windsor, Ontario, and is a Canadian-born American writer. She is best known for her nine novels about Kate Delafield, a Los Angeles homicide detective who was the first lesbian police detective in American lesbian mystery fiction, and for the romance Curious Wine, a classic of American lesbian literature.

She was for ten years fiction editor at Naiad Press, later founded and became supervising editor at Spinsters Ink, and has edited many anthologies of lesbian and gay interest. Her books have won, or been finalists for, the Lambda Literary Award twelve times.

Works

Major works

  1. 1983Curious Winea romance, long considered a classic of lesbian literature
  2. 1984Daughters of a Coral Dawnscience fiction; the first of the Coral Dawn trilogy
  3. 1984Amateur Citythe first Kate Delafield mystery
  4. 1987Murder at the Nightwood Barthe second Delafield novel, optioned for a film that was never made
  5. 1986An Emergence of Green
  6. 2004Hancock Parka Delafield mystery
  7. 2022Delafieldthe ninth novel about Kate Delafield

Timeline

Turning points

  1. 1983

    Published Curious Wine with Naiad Press.

  2. 1984

    Published the first Kate Delafield mystery, Amateur City, and the science-fiction novel Daughters of a Coral Dawn.

  3. 1999

    Received the Lambda Literary Foundation's Pioneer Award.

  4. 2005

    Received the Alice B Readers Award.

  5. 2008

    Received the Golden Crown Literary Society's Trailblazer Award and the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from Publishing Triangle.

Why they are here

Katherine V. Forrest and the shelf

Relevance

Curious Wine was one of the first lesbian romances to treat its heroines as women with every option who chose the hardest one — to love each other — and it is credited with breaking through many misconceptions about lesbians and their relationships. She is also noted for the open treatment of sexuality in her work.

Influence

As an editor she worked with hundreds of writers, among them Jane Rule and Lee Lynch, and as a founding editor at Naiad and Spinsters Ink she helped build the independent presses that made the genre.

Nearby on the shelf

If you read this, you might look here

These are Valice Press titles from the same part of the library. They are not by Katherine V. Forrest, and they are not a recommendation on Katherine V. Forrest’s behalf — only the same shelf.

Related authors

Read alongside

Sources

Where this comes from

Everything on this page about Katherine V. Forrest is written from these sources, not from memory. Their dates and key claims were checked against the sources on 8 October 2026.The life dates are compared across Wikidata and the Library of Congress’s authority records.