Feminist Publishing

Sinister Wisdom 91 is a joint release: an issue of Sinister Wisdom and a trade paperback book. Living as a Lesbian, co-published with A Midsummer Night’s Press, is issue 91 of Sinister Wisdom and the second book in a new series, Sapphic Classics.

Living as a Lesbian is Cheryl Clarke’s paean to lesbian life. Filled with sounds from her childhood in Washington, DC, the riffs of jazz musicians, and bluesy incantations, Living as a Lesbian sings like a marimba, whispering “i am, i am in love with you.”
Living as a Lesbian chronicles Clarke’s years of literary and political activism with anger, passion, and determination. Clarke mourns the death of Kimako Baraka (“sister of famous artist brother”), celebrates the life of Indira Gandhi, and chronicles all kinds of disasters—natural and human-made. The world is large in Living as a Lesbian but also personal and intimate. These poems are closely observed and finely wrought, with Clarke’s characteristic charm and wit shining throughout.

In 1986, Living as a Lesbian captured the vitality and volatility of the lesbian world; today, in a world both changed and unchanged, Clarke’s poems continue to illuminate our lives and make new meanings for Living as a Lesbian.

Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival honors the forty-year legacy of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (1976–2015). Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival celebrates this embodiment of radical feminist separatist collaboration, transformational self-defined autonomous spaces, a commitment to sisterhood and matriarchal culture, and a musical city sprung from the earth for one week in the woods.

A collective of five womyn each with a deep connection to Fest operated by consensus to create this issue. Striving to represent a range of womyn’s voices, values, traditions, and experiences of Fest, the collective highlighted what Fest has meant to generations of womyn, documented its chronology, and bore witness to the power of this community. Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival includes womyn from multiple races, geographies, sexualities, generations, and gender and other social identities. Just as Fest brought together womyn from various backgrounds, our collection includes a range of artistic experience, from seasoned authors and photographers to those womyn new to publishing.
Sinister Wisdom 103: Celebrating the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival remembers the transformations, possibilities, and hopes for spaces cultivating the ongoing empowerment of womyn.

Sinister Wisdom 107: Black Lesbians—We Are the Revolution! lifts up the voices of African-American lesbians for us all to hear, see, and know. The creative work in Sinister Wisdom 107: Black Lesbians—We Are the Revolution! gathers together new writing by an array of emerging and established black lesbian and queer women writers. Sinister Wisdom 107 invites us all as readers, thinkers, activists, and cultural workers to engage in meaningful and productive ways with the voices and works of African-American lesbians as they write and imagine new worlds.

Behind the Issue
A Conversation with Black Lesbian Poet JP Howard at AfterEllen.com
Talkin’ About a Revolution: JP Howard on Raising Her Fist—and Queer Women’s Voices

Creative Work By

Pamela Sneed
Charan P. Morris
Nikkya Hargrove
Vanesa Evers
Omotara James
Renée Bess
Cheryl Boyce-Taylor
Arisa White
Cheryl Clarke
Ifalade TaShia Asanti
Linda Bellos

And more!

Sinister Wisdom 109: Hot Spots explores the Southern spaces where lesbians gathered and organized during the past forty years. The ways that lesbians came together during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s were many and varied. There was no social media, no high-speed communication. Lesbians relied on the US Post Office, telephones, and face-to-face contact. Public advertising such as newspaper ads, flyers, and leaflets had to be done carefully and discreetly. Learning about events of the past gives templates by which to formulate and support activism in the present and future. Oppression, restriction, discrimination, and disempowerment can take many forms, some more insidious than others, and activism can be especially difficult when one is a member of a despised and criminalized minority. Sometimes, the most we can do is be ourselves and live the truth in our lives.

This issue of Sinister Wisdom, fourth in a series of special issues covering lesbian-feminist activism in the late twentieth-century South, focuses on lesbian gathering places and ways that lesbians created community while continuing activism.

Sinister Wisdom 43/44: The 15th Anniversary Retrospective is a distillation of our part in the lesbian and women's movements in the United States over the last fifteen years. This issue is a monument to our work: solid, strong, fixed in place. This issue is a marker of our movement: small and bright, bobbing in a difficult channel, sometimes obscured by waves and weather, showing direction. We hope this Retrospective will serve both lesbians who have been active in our movements for the last twenty years and new generations just getting started.

Creative Work By

Harriet Ellenberger
Julia Penelope
Audre Lorde
June Arndold and Susan Griffin
Judith McDaniel
Harriet Desmoines
Catherine Nicholson
Gloria Gyn
Emily Oddwoman
Barbara Grier
Pat Suncircle
Barbara Deming
Linda Marie

And More!

Sinister Wisdom 73: The Art Issue documents the lives of Lesbians through their artwork. This issue contains drawings, paintings, quilts, sculptures, and photographs done by Lesbian artists.

Creative Work By

Sierra Lonepine Briano
Dean Brittingham
Lynn Brown
Cathy Cade
Lenore Chinn
Karen Cooper
Tee A. Corinne
Jan Couvillon
Max Dashu
Fran Day
Francine
Tina Friemuth
Kim Fusch
Diane Germain
Marjorie Greenhut
Morgan Gwenwald
Virginia Harris

And More!