- Person
- 1966-2015
Nene Adams was a native of Miami, but lived throughout the southeastern US, as well as New York City. She worked for over a decade in the newspaper and marketing industries.
However, Adams was always in love with writing. Her first stories were examples of Xena: Warrior Princess fanfiction , but she quickly moved on to other genres and original universes. Her Gaslight novels— described as “Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes and lesbian detectives”—were Adams' claimed first attempt at dramatic original storytelling. However, her first actual work was the historical same-sex romantic fantasy The Sunne in Gold, beloved by readers but detested by its creator. As Adams put it, “Let me just say that Satan and his minions will be getting chillblains before I ever allow that book to be published again, and if I had the money, I’d buy every copy and burn it, then stamp on the ashes and sow them with salt.” [The work is included in her collection here.] Adams wrote in many genres, including historical fiction, horror, romance, and thrillers.
After posting her early work online, Adams encountered an avid fan, Corrie Kuipers, from the Netherlands. They began a long and deep friendship through email and phone calls, until Kuipers came to the US for a visit. The two fell in love, and Adams followed Kuipers back home to the Netherlands in 1998, three years before the Netherlands became the first country in the world to approve same-sex marriage. Adams and Kuipers lived together until her death on October 3, 2015.
In addition to her fiction, Adams also produced The Year 'Round: A Victorian Miscellany, a weekly posting of primary source articles and documents, as well as original Historic Homicide essays. She also maintained the "Living Library", which contained a huge treasury of lesbian-oriented short stories, novellas and novels in a variety of genres.
Adams' writing was beloved by many, and the recipient of several awards, including a Golden Crown Literary Award (Paranormal Romance) in 2010 for Barking at the Moon, the same year she wrote Flowers of Edo: A Ghost Story, which was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Her second Goldie (Mystery) was awarded in 2015 for The Consequence of Murder. She was a finalist for a 2014 Goldie (Paranormal/Horror) for the novel Burn All Alike. In 2012, she was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Royal Academy of Bards, a web community for Xena fanfiction.