Donna Allegra

Donna Allegra Simms (December 8, 1953 – January 13, 2020) was an American writer, dancer and electrician. She wrote poetry, short stories, and essays. Twelve of her stories were collected as Witness to the League of Blonde Hip Hop Dancers (2001).

Early life and education
Allegra was born in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated from Tilden High School in 1970. She attended Bennington College and Hunter College, and graduated from New York University in 1977. Her undergraduate studies focused on dramatic literature, theatre history, and film studies. "I needed them the way I needed food and shelter for survival," she wrote about the lesbian pulp novels she read as a girl. She recalled her parents as dismissive of her sexual identity as a "phase".

Career
Allegra worked as an electrician and was active in the tradeswomen movement and in IBEW Local 3. She produced radio programs The Lesbian Show and The Velvet Sledgehammer for WBAI in the late 1970s. She was a member of the Jemima Writers Collective, along with Chirlane McCray and Sapphire. She wrote stories, poems, essays, and book reviews, and was a skilled dancer. Her writings were frequently anthologized, usually alongside other Black women writers, or other lesbian writers, or other Black LGBT writers. She won the Pat Parker Memorial Poetry Prize in 1992, and was a finalist for the Violet Quill Award in 2000.

As Donna Allegra Simms, she appeared briefly in two films, Cool Hands, Warm Heart (1979, short), and Born in Flames (1983, directed by Lizzie Borden).

Publications

 * "Butch on the Streets" (1992)
 * "Carrot Juice" and "Top of the Morning" (1993, stories)
 * "Fat Dancer" (1994, essay)
 * "Buddies" (1994)
 * "Comparing class notes" (1994, essay)
 * "Between the Sheets: My Sex Life in Literature" (1995, essay)
 * "She Tickles with a Hammer" (1996, essay)
 * "Inconspicuous Assumptions" (1997, essay)
 * "Lavender Sheep in the Fold" (1997)
 * "Stilled Life" (poem)
 * "Strapped" (1997, story)
 * "Dance of the Cranes" (1997, story)
 * "Rhomboid Pegs for Oblong Hearts" (1999, essay)
 * "Smoke Detectors" (2000, poem)
 * "Navigating by Stars" (2000, story)
 * Witness to the League of Blonde Hip Hop Dancers (2000, short stories)
 * "The Dead Mothers Club" (2003, story)
 * "God Lies in the Details" (2004, story)

Personal life
Allegra died in 2020, at the age of 66, at her home in Brooklyn. Her papers are in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.