Board of Directors

Mecca Jamilah Sullivan holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Temple University, and a B.A. in Afro-American Studies from Smith College. In her fiction, she explores the intellectual, emotional, and bodily lives of young black women through voice, music, and hip-hop inflected magical realist techniques. For additional information, visit her website: http://www.meccajamilahsullivan.com/





A photo of Roberta Arnold smiling and wearing a fedora

Roberta Arnold is an old 70s lesbian-feminist writer, once radical rabble-rouser, now partially disabled volunteer, writing book reviews for Sinister Wisdom; and doing what she can do to make creative lesbian energy rattle and erupt. She believes in open dialogue with alliances: power hand-in-hand with experiencing love. She first published a story in 1970's Ain’t I A Woman, Iowa City Press Collective, which is now archived in Duke University's Lesbian Feminist Periodicals and Magazines: A Gay Fairytale, about a woman named Snowshoe who abandoned the royal family she was born into, choosing to belong to a family of working-class women cave-dwellers.





A photo of Cheryl Clarke smiling.

Cheryl Clarke is a black lesbian feminist poet and author of six books of poetry. She co-edited To Be Left with the Body, a literary publication of the AIDS Project Los Angeles for men of color who have sex with men with Steven G. Fullwood in 2008. Thanks to Julie R. Enszer, readers may access a digitized version of her work Narratives at the Lesbian Poetry Archive. In 2018, she co-edited Dump Trump: Legacies of Resistance, a special issue of Sinister Wisdom with Morgan Gwenwald, Stevie Jones, and Red Washburn. Since 2013, she has been one of the co-organizers of the annual Hobart Festival of Women Writers. After living in New Jersey since 1969, she now resides permanently in Hobart, N.Y., the Book Village of the Catskills, where her partner, Barbara Balliet, and she operate the Blenheim Hill New and Used Bookshop. Y’all come visit.





A photo of Julie R Enszer.

Julie R. Enszer is editor of Sinister Wisdom. Enszer is a scholar and poet. Her scholarship is at the intersection of U.S. history and literature with particular attention to twentieth century U.S. feminist and lesbian histories, literatures, and cultures. By examining lesbian print culture with the tools of history and literary studies, she reconsiders histories of the Women’s Liberation Movement and gay liberation. Her book manuscript, A Fine Bind: Lesbian-Feminist Publishing from 1969 through 2009, tells stories of a dozen lesbian-feminist publishers to consider the meaning of the theoretical and political formations of lesbian-feminism, separatism, and cultural feminism. You can read about her work at www.julierenszer.com.





A photo of Sara Gregory smiling.

Sara Gregory (they them + she her) is a nonbinary lesbian writer. In addition to editing and reviewing for Sinister Wisdom, Sara most recently curated the 2019 Sinister Wisdom calendar which celebrates lesbian and queer histories as creative, incendiary, and ongoing. Sara currently works in the labor movement and organizes in higher education. Sara has been published in Jezebel, Autostraddle, INTO, Bust, The Rumpus, and others. Find
more on twitter @SGregory91 or at www.saragregory.org




A photo of Rose Norman smiling in Tuscany.

Rose Norman is a retired professor of English and women's studies who grew up in rural Alabama and now lives in Huntsville, Alabama. Her lifelong interest in stories of women's lives led to scholarly research on American women's autobiography. As general editor of the Southern Lesbian-Feminist Activist Herstory Project, she has interviewed over a hundred lesbians and is now writing a book about the Pagoda, a lesbian intentional community in St. Augustine, FL (1977-c. 1999).





A photo of Joan Nestle smiling.

Joan Nestle was born in the Bronx in 1940 and spent most of her life in New York City; in 1958, she entered public lesbian life in the bars of Greenwich Village. She taught writing in the SEEK Program at Queens College from 1965 to 1990. In 1974, she co-founded the Lesbian Herstory Archives which still thrives today in its Brooklyn home. At seventy-three, Nestle is most grateful when she is forced to see with new eyes that which she thought she knew. She is the author of A Restricted Country (Cleis Press, San Francisco, 2003, first published Firebrand Press, Ithaca N.Y., 1987) and A Fragile Union (Cleis Press, San Francisco, 1998) and editor of seven other books exploring the lesbian body and imagination. For her most recent writing, see http://joannestle.com.




A photo of Yasmin Tambiah

Yasmin Tambiah, PhD is Research Officer at Institute for Culture and Society (ICS). Yasmin specializes in research, writing, editing, and project management for multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary initiatives for social change. Some of her notable works include Creating (Im)moral Citizens: Gender, Sexuality and Lawmaking in Trinidad and Tobago, 1986 (2009), Turncoat Bodies: Sexuality and Sex Work Under Militarization in Sri Lanka (2005), and Women and Governance in South Asia: Re-Imagining the State (2002). Yasmin has also won first place in the 2013 ZineWest Writing Competition!



A photo of Shromona Mandal.

Shromona Mandal Shromona Mandal is an American Studies Masters’ candidate at Brown University and received a B.A. in Sociology and Social and Cultural Analysis from New York University. They are applying to PhDs to pursue a project investigating the cultural production of Indian American Hindu elite women and they aim to contribute to a body of scholarship working to dismantle global Hindu nationalism. You can also find them making zines with student organizers.





Yeva Johnson, a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and musician whose work appears in Bellingham Review, Essential Truths: The Bay Area in Color Anthology, Sinister Wisdom, Yemassee, and elsewhere, explores interlocking caste systems and possibilities for human co-existence in our biosphere. Yeva is a past Show Us Your Spines Artist-in-Residence (RADAR Productions/San Francisco Public Library), winner of the 2020 Mostly Water Art & Poetry Splash Contest and 3rd place winner of the 2022 Effie Lee Morris Literary Contest of the Women’s National Book Association, and poet in QTPOC4SHO, a San Francisco Bay Area artists’ collective. She was a Marion Weber Healing Arts Fellow at Mesa Refuge in 2022. Her debut chapbook, Analog Poet Blues, will be published by Nomadic Press in 2023.




"Empowerment comes from ideas."

Gloria Anzaldúa

“And the metaphorical lenses we choose are crucial, having the power to magnify, create better focus, and correct our vision.”
― Charlene Carruthers

"Your silence will not protect you."

Audre Lorde

“It’s revolutionary to connect with love”
— Tourmaline

"Gender is the poetry each of us makes out of the language we are taught."

― Leslie Feinberg

“The problem with the use of language of Revolution without praxis is that it promises to change everything while keeping everything the same. “
— Leila Raven