Sinister Wisdom

Sinister Wisdom is a multicultural lesbian literary and art journal founded in 1976. Publishing four issues a year, the journal's mission is to "create multi-class, multicultural, multi-gender, multi-racial, worldwide intergenerational queer and lesbian spaces." Sinister Wisdom features fiction, essays, poetry, literary criticism, art, and feminist theory. Founded in Charlotte, North Carolina, by Catherine Nicholson and Harriet Ellenberger (also known as Harriet Desmoines), it is the longest-running lesbian feminist literary and art journal and one of the few surviving community-based journals from the women's liberation movement.

Sinister Wisdom has its roots in lesbian separatism and the women in print movement, which sought to establish autonomous communications networks of periodicals, publishers, and bookstores created by and for women. As a result, the journal accepts submissions from both novice and experienced writers and has worked with woman-owned and operated presses such as Whole Women Press and Iowa City Women's Press. With over 130 issues, it is one of the longest-running lesbian journals. Sinister Wisdom has published works by Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Maureen Brady, Minnie Bruce Pratt, and Alison Bechdel. Sapphic Classics, a partnership between Sinister Wisdom and A Midsummer Night's Press, reprints classic lesbian works for contemporary audiences.

Sinister Wisdom publishes four issues per year and features art, photography, short stories, personal accounts, poems, interviews, feminist and queer theory, and literature reviews. . The journal features primarily lesbians' work, particularly writing, art, or photography that reflects a diversity of experiences, including but not limited to lesbians of color, ethnic lesbians, Jewish, Arab, old, young, working-class, poverty-class, disabled, and fat lesbians. Each issue of Sinister Wisdom is different in content and structure, especially in the case of special issues. Each issue includes a call for submissions, and a column called "Notes for a Magazine" is written by the editor(s) of each issue. The back of the journal usually contains classified ads, particularly for feminist bookstores.

Sinister Wisdom contributed to the development of an avant-garde lesbian aesthetic, especially in its early history when it was associated with June Arnold and Daughters, Inc. Although the journal has always focused on the work of lesbians, it has also published works of "lesbian imagination" by cisgender heterosexual women such as Sharon Olds and Susan Brownmiller, transgender lesbians, and other queer women. According to current editor Julie R. Enszer, some women have canceled their subscriptions because they disagree with the journal's evolving understanding of gender and sexuality.

In 1976, Catherine Nicholson and Harriet Ellenberger (also known as Harriet Desmoines), two lesbians from Charlotte, North Carolina, attended a lesbian writing workshop in Knoxville, Tennessee, with the idea of a lesbian literary journal already in mind. Nicholson and Ellenberger had been inspired by earlier lesbian publications such as The Ladder and Amazon Quarterly to create their own journal for Southern lesbians. After attending the workshop, Nicholson and Ellenberger created a leaflet advertising the new journal and putting out an open call for submissions. Ellenberger in particular called for "revolution, reversal, and transformation" and wanted a place that was outside the patriarchal realm for lesbians to communicate and express themselves. Sinister Wisdom was named after novelist and later Sinister Wisdom contributor Joanna Russ's novel The Female Man. "Sinister" in this context means "on the left side", which is in direct contrast with the "right": the patriarchal, "rational" values that dominate society and seek to oppress the left.

In her first "Notes for a Magazine" editorial column, Ellenberger wrote:

The Law of the Fathers equates "right-over-left, white-over-black, heterosexual-over-homosexual, and male-over-female with good-over-evil." Sinister Wisdom turns these patriarchal values upside down as a necessary prelude to creating our own.

Ellenberger believed that lesbians writing and publishing for lesbians outside the traditional, patriarchal realm was the best way to connect to their audience. Her ideas aligned with lesbian feminism and the women in print movement. June Arnold, founder of feminist press Daughters, Inc., and organizer of the 1976 Women in Print Conference, supported the creation of Sinister Wisdom and may have helped fund the journal. In addition to separatist content, the journal took a grassroots approach and utilized only the talents, time, and money of women. This was in deliberate opposition to the mainstream press and publishing industries, which were dominated by men.