"What I’m proudest of, I guess, is having a life where work and love are impossible to tell apart." --Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
We’re thrilled to announce that the Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Papers, comprising 130 linear feet of materials that document Sedgwick’s scholarly career, her artistic expression, and her personal life are now available and open for research. Sedgwick (1950-2009) was a poet, artist, literary critic, and teacher. As a faculty member in the English Department at Duke from 1988-1997 and one of the founders of Queer Theory, her work helped establish this institution as an intellectual leader in the critical study of sexuality.
Image: Untitled fabric collage created by Sedgwick with silk, shibori, and stamps, with text "Reality is Flowerlike, cold clouds sinking through the dusk."
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Writing and Talking about Memoir: Little Brother, a Conversation with Sallie Bingham
Join us for a reading and conversation with author Sallie Bingham on Thursday, June 9, at 2:00 p.m. ET. In her latest memoir, Little Brother (Sarabande Books, 2022), Bingham reflects on her youngest sibling, Jonathan, and his all-too brief life. This program will be recorded and shared online. Please register online to join us via Zoom.
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Celebrating the Southern Lesbian Feminist Activist Herstory Project
Join Sinister Wisdom for a celebration of the six issues of their journal published with the Southern Lesbian Feminist Activist Herstory Project on Tuesday, May 24, at 7:00 p.m. ET. This oral history project began in 2009 as participants in WomonWrites, an annual conference of lesbian writers, sought to document the lives and experiences of lesbian activists in the American South in the late 20th century. Recordings and transcripts from the project are hosted by the Rubenstein Library. Sinister Wisdom will also present "ALFA 50: A Remembrance & Celebration of the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance" on Tuesday, June 21, at 7:00 p.m. ET. ALFA's records are housed at the Sallie Bingham Center. Register for both virtual programs through the Sinister Wisdom website.
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Broadside by Michelle Cliff
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From 'Abeng, a Description of Nanny the Leader of the Windward Maroons' [broadside] by Michelle Cliff
(Martinsville, IN: Helaine Victoria Press, 1984.)
This edition of two hundred broadsides was printed on a Chandler & Price platen press. Design, presswork, and hand composition by Jocelyn H. Cohen using Munder Venezian foundry types and sixteenth century initials. The broadside was printed on Strathmore Brigadoon paper, signed by Cliff and Cohen, and the type distributed in May 1984.
Helaine Victoria Press, which brought together lesbian feminist politics with fine press technique, was famous for its extensive body of women’s history postcards. The press, which took its name from the middle names of founders Jocelyn Helaine Cohen and Nancy Taylor Victoria Poore, started with an offset press in Santa Monica but switched to an 80-year old cast iron letterpress, “the method which was standard when we were trying to get the vote.” Michelle Cliff was born in Jamaica and the partner of Adrienne Rich, who also had a limited-edition broadside published by Helaine Victoria Press that is included in the holdings of the Bingham Center.
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This semester we introduced primary sources of all shapes and sizes, from 17th century Chinese texts to zines from the early 2000s, across a wide range of courses:
- African Diaspora Literature: Black Lives Matter
- Archival Appraisal
- Condoms and Counseling
- Faith and Feminism in North Carolina
- Feminist Art
- Gender and Every Day Life
- History of the Book: Session on women printers, publishers, and readers
- Public Policy: Leadership and the Arts
- Publishing and Marketing Popular Fiction
- Race, Gender, and Sexuality
- Writing 101: Book, Art, Object
- Writing 101: Dolly Parton for President?
Check out an exhibit highlighting Rubenstein Library's instruction program with materials we share in the classroom, including romance novels by Georgia political leader Stacey Abrams under her pen name Selena Montgomery, on display through October 15, 2022.
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"No more pats on the head... Better paychecks instead!"
Flyer from the Margo George series in the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance Archives.
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