Sinister Wisdom

What are Jewish lesbians thinking about? Writing about? Making art about now, here in the first two decades of the 21st Century? Do we see ourselves as Jewish dykes? Jewish lesbians? Genderqueer Jews? How are we thinking about our Jewish lesbian communities and families, natal or invented? How have our relationships to the states of Israel and Palestine changed over time? Can we reconcile the contradictions between our faiths and our politics? Our gender and racial identities? How do we envision our futures and reimagine our pasts, especially in these fractious and dangerous times? One thing is certain. Our commitments to making trouble and speaking up are strong.

This issue of Sinister Wisdom: To Be a Jewish Dyke in the 21st Century, which takes its title from that life-giving stanza in Muriel Rukeyser’s epic poem “letter to the Front”, is a gathering of answers, challenges, and opinions directed at these and other questions.

Featuring work by
Yael Mishali
JEB (Joan E. Biren)
Terry Baum
Joan Larkin
Susan Sherman
Clare Kinberg
Irena Klepfisz
Nancy K Bereano
Penny Rosenwasser
Bonnie Morris
Jyl Lynn Felman
Marla Brettschneider
And more!

Sinister Wisdom 33: Wisdom asks the questions: How do we express the wisdom we've come to have, the wisdom we still seek? How has wisdom been passed on to us? What's stayed through time - from family, other womyn, from what we've read, from experience?

Creative Work By

Adrienne Rich
Gloria Anzaldúa
Chrystos
Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz
Leslita Williams
Barbara Ruth
Paula Brooks
Teya Schaffer
Lynn Crawford
Jan Hardy
Judy Meisksin
Margaret Tongue
Rose Romano
Nancy Humphreys
Patricia Filipowska

And More!

Sinister Wisdom 34: Sci-Fi, Fantasy & Lesbian Visions creates worlds with wild imaginings of past present and future as we'd want it: from forms of government to forms of sex. When we name what we want, we create the road towards it. This issue infuses our present with all manner of fabulous images in order to challenge our habits of thought.

Creative Work By

Judith Katz
Tara Danaan
Beth Povinelli
Sarah Lucia Hoagland
Anna Livia
Laura Hershey
Nicky Morris
Marjory Nelson
Sawnie Morris
zana
Catalina Ríos
Donna Allegra
Christian McEwen
Sheila Ortiz Taylor
Bernice Mennis
Michelle D. Williams

And More!

Sinister Wisdom 46: Dyke Lives is dedicated to be a community space for dykes all over. This issue wants to see trouble, sharpen the edges of dissatisfaction into action, suspect its own comfort and compromises, and see the patriarchy end in its lifetime.

Creative Work By

Janet Aalfs
Terri Jewell
Deb Parks-Safferfield
olga Krause
Teya Schaffer
Susan Hawthorne
Joanna Kadi
Lorrie Sprecher
Elana Dykewomon
Elizabeth Clare
Deborah Schwartz
Lorrie Sprecher
Lierre Keith
Renee Hahn
Sharon Lim-Hing
Diane Fraser
Patt Kelly

And More!

Sinister Wisdom 48: Lesbian Resistance's writers envision taking power in many ways: some advocate armed struggle, others believe in challenging systems from within, some speak for coalition politics, some for separatism, still others imagine resistance as changing the processes between us. This issue admires and encourages this fantastic lesbian resilience.

Creative Work By

Kathleen O'Donnell
Janice Gutman
Naomi Guilbert
Amber L. Katherine
Sauda Burch
Lisa kenney
Susan Rosenberg
Laura Whitehorn
Jo Ann Starr
Sheila Gilhooly and barbara findlay
L.A. Dyer
Lenore Baeli Wang
Jasmine Marah

And More!

Sinister Wisdom 49: The Lesbian Body talks about the ways we experience and perceive our own Lesbian bodies, and the anti-lesbian/lesbian-feminist backlash. The idea of a lesbian body can be a kind of a labyrinth - a series of chambers in which it is difficult to find our way, though we can hear her heartbeat through the walls.

Creative Work By

Deborah
Alejandra Laurenz
Kadeth Pozzesi
Caroline Halliday
Peg O'Connor
Sheila J. Packa
Janet Mason
Kate Berne Miller
Laura Hershey
Naja Sorella
Lisa Edmonds
Judith P. Stelboum
Cherie Bowers
Suzanne
Donna Tanigawa
Arl Spencer Nadel
Elissa Raffa
Kelly Jean Cogswell
Chaia Zblocki heller

And More!

Sinister Wisdom 51: New Lesbian Writing is a resource to connect Lesbian communities from far and wide. This issue allows for self-expression through a variety of Lesbian intersectionalities such as race, class, age, experience, etc.

Creative Work By

tatiana de la tierra
Akiko Carver
Victoria Lena Manyarrows
Teresa Ortega
Elliott
Janet Mason
Sima Rabinowitz
Suzanne
Jeannie Witkin
Josi Mata
C.E. Atkins
Anna Livia
Carellin Brooks
Reggie W. Brewster
Pamela Gray
Lois DeWitt
Kathryn Eberly

And More!

Sinister Wisdom 52: Allies adresses what lesbians what from our allies. We say we're a community dedicated to changing conditions and attitudes around race, class, age, ability, size, appearance. As allies, how are we making that happen?

Special Features

Interviews of Andrea Calderón,
Lynne Scott, Lisa Rudman,
Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz,
Kit Yuen Quan, Mattie Richardson,
Hadas Weiss, Akiba Onada-Sikwoia,
Gloria Anzalduá, and Barbara Smith

Creative Work By

Rachael Rosen
Judith K. Witherow
Lisa Huebner
Caryatis Cardea
Jamie Lee Evans
Neta C. Crawford
Aspen
Sadie Green

and More!

Sinister Wisdom 77: Environmental Issues Lesbian Concerns lets our Earth Mother know our fears, concerns, anger and our need to take care of her for we are her. AS daughters of Earth Mother we honor our female bond through song and praise, and respect her as she cycles through our lives. Like a daughter who is connected to her Mother, Mother Earth Lesbians throughout the world are sensitively aware of what is happening to her. In Sinister Wisdom 77, our praise has turned to please and cries for mercy that she continues to sustain us.

Special Features

Book Reviews of Shedding Grace,
Sex Variant Woman, and Elsa:I Come with my Songs

Music Review of Heartsongs

Creative Work By

Fran Day
Ruth Zachary
Jeanne Neath
Ellen Williams
Brenwyn
Mary Oishi
Jan Shade
Natasha Carthew
Carole Gale
Alma
Judith K. Witherow

And More!

Sinister Wisdom 57: On Healing is about unequivocal survival, courage, creativity, vision, alchemy and, unfortunately, the systematic matter-of-fact violence most girls and wimmin are born into. The Courage these wimmin found to speak, to continue living and loving gives all Lesbians so much strength to pull from.

Creative Works By

April Citizen Kane
Chrystos
Cheryl Jones
Joan Annsfire
Rivka Mason and Jan Thomas
Elizabeth N. Evasdaughter
Mariah L. Richardson
A. Miriasiem Barnes
Laura C. Luna
Christina Springer
Adrienne Y. Nelson
Marianne Hewitt
K. Linda Kivi
Debby Earthdaughter
and more!

Sinister Wisdom 32: Special Issue on Death, Healing, Mourning, and Illness is a special issue on death, healing, mourning, and illness. This issue demonstrates that lesbians need to not only be remembered while they are with us, but also after they are long gone. We need to keep their voices heard in order to document our existence on this Earth.

Creative Work By

Maia
Barrie Borich
Lynn Crawford
Susan Hansell
Hilary Mullins
jillian wilkowski
Norma Fain Pratt
Lynn Martin
Donna Allegra
Nancy Barickman
Pamela Pratt
Vicki Sears
Maude Meehan
Lauri J. Hoskin
Elana Dykewomon
Beth McDonald
Diana Rivers
Rose Romano

And More!

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!

Forty-five years ago movements of liberation made possible the birth of a new project in the world, the Lesbian Herstory Archives. In Sinister Wisdom 118 are some of the founding stories, telling what it meant to walk first into an apartment and later into a four-story limestone building, where shame became history, secrets became shared connections and complex lesbian, queer histories were enriched by maintaining intergenerational community.

A grassroots collection, the Archives was intentional about engaging with all facets and complexities of lesbian life, inclusive of diversity in race and gender-identity, from the bar life of the fifties and before, to the lesbian-feminist cultural richness of the mid-twentieth century and beynd, to the gender richness of the tweny-first. This issue honors an Archives that articulates the complexities of how lesbians make our way in the world.

How do lesbians live in the city, whether they live in the city by themselves or within intentional community? How does the city change what being a lesbian means? Sinister Wisdom 117: Lesbians in the City explores these questions—and many more.

The issue features creative work by: Srestha Sen, Carina Julig, Roin Morigeau, t pomar, Rita Mookerjee, Margarita Meklina as well as SPORTS — a selection of work from the Southern Lesbian Feminist Activist Herstory Project, edited by Rose Norman and Merril Mushroom. Plus a great selection of new lesbian writing!

A Midsummer Night’s Press and Sinister Wisdom are pleased to announce the publication of Sinister Wisdom 102: The Complete Works of Pat Parker with a new introduction by poet and scholar Judy Grahn; an afterword by volume editor Julie R. Enszer, with extensive notes on the poems; photographs of Parker and a bibliography.

'In The Complete Works of Pat Parker, we have a trove of her artistic and political engagements-poetry and stories and plays and speeches; these are not separate realities. They intertwine in her now classic works, Movement in Black (1978), Womanslaughter (1978), and Jonestown & Other Madness (1985). But here too are less celebrated and uncollected works, plays especially, that show off Parker’s willingness to experiment, to push us towards more politicized realities.' - Alexis de Veaux

Included in Sinister Wisdom 102: The Complete Works of Pat Parker are Parker’s masterwork, Movement in Black, as well as Jonestown & other madness. Parker’s prose writing is collected in The Complete Works along with two unpublished plays and a number of previously uncollected poems. Editor Julie R. Enszer notes, “The breadth of creative output collected here demonstrates the seriousness of Parker’s overall work as a writer. Beginning in 1963, when she was nineteen years old, and continuing until she died in 1989, Parker took her work as a writer seriously. Gathering as much of it as possible into a single volume invites readers to take it seriously as well.”

Making Connections is the fifth issue of Sinister Wisdom's series of work edited by the Southern Lesbian Feminist Activist Herstory Project, documenting the vital lesbian-feminist activism that proliferated in the US South during the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Making Connections details the extensive networking of lesbian booksellers, publishers, writing groups, and newsletter through engaging interviews, first person narratives, and innovative graphic timelines.

Sinister Wisdom and Inanna Publications & Education Inc. are proud to present a new volume of the work of Native American writer Beth Brant, edited by Janice Gould.

A Generous Spirit: Selected Work by Beth Brant collects the writing of Beth Brant, Mohawk lesbian poet, essayist and activist. During her life, Brant’s work gave voice to an often unacknowledged Two-Spirit identity, and today, her words represent continued strength, growth, and connection in the face of deep suffering.

A Generous Spirit is Brant’s portrait of survival and empathy at the intersection of Native American and lesbian experience. A Generous Spirit recounts and enacts the continuance of her people and her sisters with distinct, organic voices and Brant’s characteristic warmth. Her work is a simultaneous cry of grief and celebration of human compassion and connection in its shared experience. Through storytelling, her characters wrest their own voices from years of silence and find communion with other souls.

With a substantial introduction by Janice Gould situating Brant in a broader political and literary context, a foreword by acclaimed Canadian poet Lee Maracle, and a moving afterword by scholar and poet Deborah Miranda, A Generous Spirit is a tribute to the influence of Brant on a generation of Indigenous writers.

Sinister Wisdom 113: Radical Muses features an eclectic array of contemporary poetry, prose, and art by lesbians from around the world, including new work by: Andrea Assaf, Tara Shea Burke, Cheryl Clarke, Marina Chirkova, Estela González, Barbara Haas, Nancy E. Lake, Vi Khi Nao, H. Ní Aódagaín and much more!

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.