In 2026, Sinister Wisdom will be celebrating its 50th anniversary! As part of our celebration, we have been working on a tribute series called the "Croning Project" since 2017.

If you would like to enjoy these tributes to our history, both links and PDF copies of these tributes have been included for download.

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MEET THE WRITERS!

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Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz is an Assistant Professor and Head of Reference at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. She is the LGBTQ studies library liaison, serves as s a volunteer coordinator at the Lesbian Herstory Archives, and has even co-edited a special issue of Sinister Wisdom! For additional information, visit her website: https://shawntasmithcruz.com/

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Erika Gisela Abad, PhD, is a Queer Puerto Rican/Dominican teaching in Las Vegas. She has contributed to and reviewed for Sinister Wisdom. Her commitment to queer writing communities sustained her participation in Portland, OR’s former Dirty Queer open mic. She also supports the work of Surviving the Mic, a survivor centered, queer positive open mic in Chicago. You can follow her at @prof_eabad on Twitter and Instagram.

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Carina Julig is a lesbian writer and journalist who previously served as an intern at Sinister Wisdom. She helped put together volumes 107–110 and worked to promote Sinister Wisdom online and in social media. She has also interned at the Boulder Daily Camera and has written for publications including Slate, the Columbia Journalism Review, Al Jazeera, and Sojourners Magazine. She specializes in reporting on immigration, sexuality, and religion. She is a student at the University of Colorado Boulder and will be graduating in December 2019 with a degree in journalism. You can follow her on twitter @CarinaJulig.

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Nadine Rodriguez is a queer, non-binary Cuban-American writer and photographer. They were born and raised in Miami, Florida but currently live in Marquette, Michigan. They are an MFA candidate for Fiction at Northern Michigan University, an Associate Fiction Editor for Passages North, and a co-editor for us here at Sinister Wisdom. For additional information, visit their website: https://www.nadine-rodriguez.com/

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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/

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Natalie Eleanor Patterson is a half-Cuban femme lesbian poet and editor from suburban Georgia with a BA in English and Creative Writing from Salem College. She is the author of the chapbook Plainhollow (dancing girl press, 2022) and the editor of Dream of the River (Jacar Press, 2021), and has work featured in Sinister Wisdom, Hunger Mountain, Yes Poetry, and more. She has received the 2018 and 2021 Katherine B. Rondthaler Award in Poetry from Salem College, a Best of the Net 2018-2019 nomination, and a 2020 Pushcart Prize nomination. She is the assistant editor of Jacar Press, a reader for One, and consulting editor with Sable Books. She is an MFA candidate in poetry at Oregon State University.

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Shromona Mandal is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University, investigating the cultural production and political organizing of right-wing Hindu women in the U.S. South. Their research interests sit within questions of orientalism in the commodification of intimate life, South Asian diaspora and empire, and the co-constitutive structures of race, caste, class, and gender. In their life before graduate school, they were an anti-imperialist and abolitionist student organizer. Now they are searching for a political home after moving to Atlanta.