Audre Lorde

In 1979, JEB self-published her first book, Eye to Eye: Portraits of Lesbians. In a work that was revolutionary for its era, JEB made photographs of lesbians from different ages and backgrounds in their everyday lives—working, playing, raising families, and striving to remake their worlds. The photographs were accompanied by writings from acclaimed authors including Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Joan Nestle, and others. Various women pictured in the book also shared their personal stories. Eye to Eye signaled a radical new way of seeing, moving lesbian lives from the margins to the center, and reversing a history of invisibility. More than just a book, it was an affirmation of the existence of lesbians that helped to propel a political movement. Reprinted for the first time in forty years, Eye to Eye is a faithful reproduction of a work that still resonates today. This edition features additional essays from artist and writer Tee Corinne, former World Cup soccer player Lori Lindsey, and photographer Lola Flash.

In this collection of personal essays and poetry, acclaimed poet and performer Pamela Sneed details her coming of age in New York City during the late 1980s. Funeral Diva captures the impact of AIDS on black queer life, and highlights the enduring bonds between the living, the dying, and the dead. Sneed's poems not only converse with lovers past and present, but also with her literary forebears - like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde - whose aesthetic and thematic investments she renews for a contemporary American landscape. Offering critical focus on matters from police brutality to LGBTQ+ rights, Funeral Diva confronts the most pressing issues of our time with acerbic wit and audacity.

Poet, professor, and performer, Pamela Sneed is the author of Sweet Dreams, Kong, and Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery. She was a Visiting Critic at Yale, and at Columbia University's School of the Arts, and is online faculty at Chicago's School of the Art Institute teaching Human Rights and Writing Art. She also teaches new genres at Columbia's School of the Arts in the Visual Dept. Her work is widely anthologized and appears in Nikki Giovanni's, The 100 Best African American Poems.

Published October 2020

Funeral Divais the Winner of the Lambda Award for Lesbian Poetry.

Stronger than Bone draws upon the embodied strength, intuitive desires, and collective wisdom of feminists and non-binary protagonists to foreground the manifold dimensions of feminist politics and commitments.

Written by thinkers and allies across generations with a focus on heterogeneity, intersectionality, and influence across geographies, this reader arrives into the world at a moment of heightened fragility, under the shadow of the coronavirus pandemic. In key historical texts, poetry, and new commissions, a range of artists, theorists, philosophers, and writers grapple with how gender politics might be reconfigured in a world undergoing an interregnum of extraordinary intellectual, technological, political, artistic, and social ferment.

Stronger than Bone reveals strands of inquiry into a range of subjects including: embodiment and techno feminism; sexual freedom and sexual violence; matriarchal resistance building and shamanic practices; the gendered dimensions of self-optimization; digital identity and gaming culture; how the trauma of state violence and racial injustice is passed to future generations; and artistic strategies of renewal and rewriting history. With a view to the peril and possibility of the current moment, bringing together this constellation of voices is an act of acknowledging kinship, one iteration of the liberatory potential of collective forms of intelligence!

Contributions by Chris Abani, Gloria Anzaldúa, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun & Sarah Friedland, Tishani Doshi, Maya Indira Ganesh, Eeva-Kristiina Harlin & Ciske-Jovsset Biret Hánsa Outi/Outi Pieski, Laurel Kendall, Kim Hyesoon, Kim Seongnae, S. Heijin Lee, Audre Lorde, Soraya Murray, Esha Pillay & Quishile Charan, Djamila Ribeiro, Tamarra & Brigitta Isabella, Oxana Timofeeva, Cecilia Vicuña.

Blending memoir with critique, an award-winning poet and essayist's devastating exploration of sickness and health, cancer and the cancer industry, in the modern world

A week after her 41st birthday, Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living payslip to payslip, the condition was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness.

In The Undying - at once her harrowing memoir of survival, and a 21st-century Illness as Metaphor - Boyer draws on sources from ancient Roman dream diarists to cancer vloggers to explore the experience of illness. She investigates the quackeries, casualties and ecological costs of cancer under capitalism, and dives into the long line of women writing about their own illnesses and deaths, among them Audre Lorde, Kathy Acker and Susan Sontag.

Genre-bending, devastating and profoundly humane, The Undying is an unmissably insightful meditation on cancer, the cancer industry and the sicknesses and glories of contemporary life.

Winner of The Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction 2020; Windham Campbell Prize for Nonfiction 2020

Where are the tiny revolts? is the first book in a new annual series published by CCA Wattis Institute, a contemporary art center and research institute in San Francisco. Each book in the series is driven by a central question: what are we learning from artists today? Unconnected to an exhibition program, Where are the tiny revolts? is rooted in the Wattis's artist-driven research institute. It is a place to explore and share some of the texts and visual work that emerge over the course of an entire year of discussions and public programs. Instead of providing documentation of projects with artists, Where are the tiny revolts? offers other ideas, voices, and references generated by conversations with and about artists. 

The first book in the series, informed by themes related to the work of Dodie Bellamy, revolves around questions related to contemporary forms of feminism and sexualities, the rebirth of the author, and ways in which vulnerability, perversion, vulgarity, and self-exposure can be forms of empowerment. The texts cover a broad array of styles, including memoir, theoretical essay, art historical analysis, poetry, and fiction. The visual elements are equally diverse, ranging from photographs to collage to drawing.

Texts by Sara Ahmed, Nicole Archer, Georges Bataille, Dodie Bellamy, Michele Carlson, Thomas Clerc, Combahee River Collective, Bob Flanagan, Ursula K. Le Guin, Johanna Hedva, Glen Helfand, Juliana Huxtable, Alex Kitnick, Julia Kristeva, Audre Lorde, Lisa Robertson; contributions by Marcela Pardo Ariza, Justin G. Binek, Kaucyila Brooke, Tammy Rae Carland, Mary Beth Edelson, Mike Kuchar, Anne McGuire, Patrick Staff, Frances Stark, Rosemarie Trockel.

From Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich to Basma Alsharif and Pauline Oliveros, Deux Soeurs brings together a chorus of voices that explore representations of parenthood, friendship, and disobedience.

The book acts as a reader to artist Beatrice Gibson's films, I Hope I'm Loud When I'm Dead (2018) and Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters (2019), and includes material that informed Gibson's working process, together with the artist's texts and notes used in both films. Turning to the figure of the poet as a guide in times of chaos, Deux Soeurs presents a framework for an ethics of artistic and social collaboration.

A week after her forty-first birthday, the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer. For a single mother living paycheck to paycheck who had always been the caregiver rather than the one needing care, the catastrophic illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness.

A twenty-first-century Illness as Metaphor, as well as a harrowing memoir of survival, The Undying explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in ancient Roman dream diarists, cancer hoaxers and fetishists, cancer vloggers, corporate lies, John Donne, pro-pain ”dolorists,” the ecological costs of chemotherapy, and the many little murders of capitalism. It excoriates the pharmaceutical industry and the bland hypocrisies of ”pink ribbon culture” while also diving into the long literary line of women writing about their own illnesses and ongoing deaths: Audre Lorde, Kathy Acker, Susan Sontag, and others.

Poets Audre Lorde and Pat Parker first met in 1969; they began exchanging letters regularly five years later. Over the next fifteen years, Lorde and Parker shared ideas, advice, and confidences through the mail. They sent each other handwritten and typewritten letters and postcards often with inserted items including articles, money, and video tapes.

Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989 gathers this correspondence for readers to eavesdrop on Lorde and Parker. They discuss their work as writers as well as intimate details of their lives, including periods when each lived with cancer. Sister Love is a rare opportunity to glimpse inside the minds and friendship of two great twentieth century poets.

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!