American writer Patricia Nell Warren was BOTD in 1936. Born in Helena, Montana, she grew up on a cattle ranch. She began writing as a child, and won the Atlantic Monthly College Fiction Prize when she was 18, launching her literary career. She studied at Stephens College in Missouri, moving to New York in the mid-1950s at Manhattanville College. In 1957, she married Ukrainian poet Yuriy Tarnawsky, through whom she became associated with the New York Group, and began writing poetry in Ukrainian under the name Patricia Kilina. She worked for Reader’s Digest for over 20 years, eventually becoming editor of the magazine and Condensed Book Club. Her first novel, The Last Centennial was published in 1971. Warren came out as a lesbian in 1973, separating from Tarnawsky and cutting ties with the New York Group. She had unexpected success with her 1974 novel The Front Runner, the story of a gay track coach falling in love with his teenaged star athlete. Praised and condemned for its controversial subject matter, it sold ten million copies and was the first contemporary gay-themed novel to reach the The New York Times bestseller list. Warren had further success with her 1976 novel The Fancy Dancer, portraying a gay priest living in a small American town, and 1978’s The Beauty Queen, in which a closeted gay father comes out to his fundamentalist Christian daughter. Warren moved to California in the 1980s, establishing her own publishing house, Wildcat Press, to publish her subsequent work. In later years, she became heavily involved in LGBTQ activism, becoming a co-plaintiff in several Supreme Court cases challenging the censorship of LGBTQ-themed literature. She also served as a commissioner of education for the Los Angeles Unified School District. She died in 2019, aged 82.