Asian Lesbians! Do you feel invisible to other queer women or Asian lesbians? Isolated? Happy? Charismatic? Shy? Defiant? Modest? Soft-spoken? Boisterous? Empowered? Helpless? Bold? Bald? Not Asian enough? Disconnected? Tom-boyish? Androgynous? Academically Sapphic? Retired?

Sinister Wisdom invites and welcomes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, art, and genre-bending works from all Asian Lesbians: American-born Asians, South Asians, Southeast Asians, East Asians, etc. We welcome work from Asians Lesbians in the States and all over the world written predominately in English.

If you are lesbian and Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Indian, Pakistani, Bangledeshi, Sri Lankan, Nepalese, Afghan, Mongolian, Taiwanese, Korean, Hong Kongese, Macanese, Cambodian, Thai, Laotian, Singaporean, Malaysian, Pilipino, Indonesian, Burmese, Timorese, etc, please submit to us.

If your Sapphic work deals with Asian desire, fetishism, straightness camouflaging, homophobia, genocide, fasting, seclusion, negation, invisibility, confusion, arranged marriages, bisexuality, Daoism, Christianity, Taoism, Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism, agnosticism, atheism, negative stereotypes such as apathetic, outsourcing, “Geisha Girl,” or “perpetual foreigners”, please submit to us.

If your work is Asian, Sapphic, healthy and happy, please submit to us.

If your work is Asian, Sapphic, erotic, scholarly, secular, graphic, phantastical, haiku-ic, asexual, sassy, nuptial, eye-opening, monochromatic, please submit to us.

If your work deals with Asian Sapphic suicide, public flogging for having lesbian sex in a car, mung bean cakes, compassion, defecation and rape, nail salons, criminalized Asian lesbianism, avocado sushi rolls, dry-cleaning, cancer, impotence, astrology, lentil, naan, and chickpeas, and everything else please submit your work to us.

If you (mis) identify yourself as bamboo ceiling lesbians, not-a-model-minority due to your excessive or non-excessive lesbianism, facial whitening, please submit to us.

If you think you are not submissive or obedient, but you are Sapphic and Asian, please submit your work to us. If you think you are blissfully complacent and shy, please submit your work to us anyway.

If you work addresses Asian culture, music, food, travel, and Sapphic mail-in brides, please submit to us.

If you know someone who is Asian & lesbian, please encourage them to submit their work to us.

If you are Asian & lesbian, and your work does not deal with any of the above topics, desires, foie gras, martial arts, please submit to us regardless.

If you are Asian & lesbian, please submit poetry, visual art, comics, photographs, anime and films (screenshots only), interviews, academic anecdotes or notes, fiction, non-fiction, and genre-bending works to Sinister Wisdom through Submittable.

Images should .jpg or .tif files only, and be of print resolution, sized at least 300 ppi (pixels per inch).

The deadline for submissions is September 30, 2019. The anticipated publication date for this issue is in 2020.

Guest Editor: Vi Khi Nao. Born in Long Khanh, Vietnam, Vi is the author of Sheep Machine (Black Sun Lit, 2018) and Umbilical Hospital (Press 1913, 2017), and of the short stories collection, A Brief Alphabet of Torture, which won FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize in 2016, the novel, Fish in Exile (Coffee House Press, 2016), and the poetry collection, The Old Philosopher, which won the Nightboat Books Prize for Poetry in 2014 and is a finalist for a 2017 Lambda Literary Award. Her work includes poetry, fiction, film and cross-genre collaboration. Her stories, poems, and drawings have appeared in NOON, Ploughshares, Black Warrior Review and BOMB, among others. She holds an MFA in fiction from Brown University.