The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture

Summary

Finalist, 2025 Frances Fuller Victor Award in General Nonfiction, Oregon Book Awards

Honorable Mention, 2024 William Sanders Scarborough Prize, Modern Language Association

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. Calling themselves "The Sisterhood," the group 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. Courtney Thorsson explores the group's everyday collaboration and profound legacy. The Sisterhood advocated for Black women writers at trade publishers and magazines. 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 how younger writers built on the foundations the group laid. Highlighting the organizing, networking, and community building that nurtured Black women's writing, this book demonstrates that The Sisterhood offers an enduring model for Black feminist collaboration.