Paula Trachtman was an author, editor, teacher, and activist. She published one novel, the suspenseful horror Disturb Not The Dream, which sold over 500,000 paperback copies in 1982. She had completed a manuscript for a book to be titled Nicholas III: Tsar of All Russia, which was based on a conceit that Nicholas II had an illegitimate son by a British aristocrat who reclaimed the throne during the Stalin era. She abandoned the manuscript and all attempts of writing commercial fiction after the premature death of her daughter, Amy. In 1995, Ms. Trachtman and her husband Edward Butscher founded the Amy Award, in honour of her late daughter who was a promising poet. The annual prize is administered by the literary organization Poets and Writers, for female poets under the age of 30, who read aloud from their own poetry and from Amy’s. Ms. Trachtman died of a heart attack in her sleep, less than a week before what would have been her 88th birthday.