One Sunday afternoon in February 1977, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker,
Ntozake Shange, and several other Black women writers met at June
Jordan’s Brooklyn apartment to eat gumbo, drink champagne, and talk
about their work. Calling themselves “The Sisterhood,” the group—which
also came to include Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Margo Jefferson, and
others—would get together once a month over the next two years, creating
a vital space for Black women to discuss literature and liberation.
The Sisterhood
tells the story of how this remarkable community transformed American
writing and cultural institutions. Drawing on original interviews with
Sisterhood members as well as correspondence, meeting minutes, and close
readings of their works, Courtney Thorsson explores the group’s
everyday collaboration and profound legacy. The Sisterhood advocated for
Black women writers at trade publishers and magazines such as Random
House, Ms., and Essence, and eventually in academic
departments as well—even in the face of sexist, racist, and homophobic
backlash. Thorsson traces the personal, professional, and political ties
that brought the group together as well as the reasons for its
dissolution. She considers the popular and critical success of
Sisterhood members in the 1980s, the uneasy absorption of Black feminism
into the academy, and the younger writers building on the foundations
the group laid. Highlighting the organizing and community building that
nurtured Black women’s writing, this book demonstrates that The
Sisterhood offers an enduring model for Black feminist collaboration.