Author Archives: weird sister

The Weird Sister Collection, Now Available for Preorder from The Feminist Press

Cover for The Weird Sister Collection by Mary Anne Carter, featuring colorful gem illustrations


We’re excited to share that The Weird Sister Collection, an anthology of writing from the Weird Sister blog along with some new work, will be published next month by The Feminist Press and is now available for preorder!

Collecting the best of the underground blog Weird Sister, these unapologetic and insightful essays link contemporary feminism to literature and pop culture.

Launched in 2014, Weird Sister proudly staked out a corner of the internet where feminist writers could engage with the literary and popular culture that excited or enraged them. The blog made space amid book websites dominated by white male editors and contributors, and also committed to covering literary topics in-depth when larger feminist outlets rarely could. Throughout its decade-long run, Weird Sister served as an early platform for some of contemporary literature’s most striking voices, naming itself a website that “speaks its mind and snaps its gum and doesn’t apologize.”

Edited by founder Marisa Crawford, The Weird Sister Collection brings together the work of longtime contributors such as Morgan Parker, Christopher Soto, Soleil Ho, Julián Delgado Lopera, Virgie Tovar, Jennif(f)er Tamayo, and more, alongside new original essays. Offering nuanced insight into contemporary and historical literature, in conversation with real-life and timely social issues, these pieces mark a transitional and transformative moment in online and feminist writing.

Advance praise for The Weird Sister Collection:

The Weird Sister Collection is a reminder that feminism doesn’t live solely in academia and activism, and in fact makes its most defiant moves at the margins of orthodoxy. The book’s mix of poetics, criticism, and pop culture is an unruly and potent brew that fizzes with life as it vaporizes feminist and literary conventions.”—Andi Zeisler, co-founder of Bitch; author of We Were Feminists Once: From RiotGrrrl to CoverGirl™, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement

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Writing at the Intersections of Feminism & Pop Culture, 5/11 at SOHO20

SOHO20 gallery

weird sister feminism

We’re excited to join SOHO20 Gallery next Friday night for Writing at the Intersections of Feminism & Pop Culture!

Part of the gallery’s Rethinking Feminism series and program fellowship Home on the Page: towards a feminist public, Weird Sister will be taking over the gallery for a night of readings and discussion. Poets and journalists will share new work exploring feminism, gender, race, the media, pop culture and the everyday.  Continue reading

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Reversible Available Now!

Weird Sister founder and editor-in-chief Marisa Crawford’s new poetry collection Reversible is now available from Switchback Books!

Marisa Crawford Reversible

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What people are saying about Reversible:

“Be prepared to be washed in nostalgia when you crack open Marisa Crawford’s new collection Reversible. Crawford’s work mixes pop culture, social commentary, and vivid memory in this this unabashedly feminist collection.” — Bustle 

Reversible is nostalgic, dark, surprising yet warmly familiar. I mourn for the girlhood of this book.” — Morgan Parker

“Crawford’s poems know, better than any I’ve ever read, that fashion is imagery; ditto for friendships and stickers and backyard pools and the things girls do to their bodies in their bedrooms late at night.” — Becca Klaver

Reversible is the glossy mixtape of girl in becoming […]. I can relate to the poems’ ‘you’ or ‘we’ in ways mediated by the ‘trinity’ of race, class, & gender—as the poems here certainly locate themselves within—or in the other similarly dangerous trinity of: are you on your period, what’s your rising sign, & who’s your favorite Spice Girl.” — Jennifer Tamayo  Continue reading

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WEIRD SISTER Responds to the Women’s March

Millions of women marched in cities across the country this past Saturday. Many others chose not to participate, and/or were unable to attend for various reasons. We rounded up responses from Weird Sister’s contributors and community members on why we marched—or why we didn’t—what these marches say about feminism, and how to move forward from here.

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EVERYBODY WALKS IN LA

The trains pulling into the Lincoln Cypress stop on the LA Metro’s Gold Line were so full that no one could squeeze on. People teemed around the parking lot. We held space for friends in the ticket line and met someone’s mom. The platform was crowded, but the space between bodies felt stretchable, or collapsable, sky-activated. Clouds shed themselves at the edges, fat and shining—one blue morning parenthesized by days of rain. It’s a metaphor because that’s where description swerves, but the Trump administration just scrubbed climate change from the White House website, so I’m foregrounding the nonhuman now and forever, or as long as we last.

I.’s roommate popped out of nowhere, a first-time ever demonstrator who knows the city by bike and foot, so we hopped in his car and drove down San Fernando, past the river running high on its concrete banks, all that runoff whooshing out to sea because that’s channelization—sorry, drought—then parked in Chinatown, then walked. Tent kiosks lined Broadway on the way to Pershing square. Men from the organization Sikh Community served hot food. “We want to show who we are,” one of the men said. We ate hot garbanzo stew gratefully. We were hungry and it was delicious. Then we marched. To be a granule amongst granules, pivoting in unison now and then on the surge of a skyward cheer toward news helicopters, swarm without end, a headache running interference. We found our friends by their signs.

On our way out, we stopped on a freeway overpass on Hill Street, looking over a tent encampment. Over the Hollywood/Pasadena Freeway confluence, demonstrators waved more signs, everyone was taking a walk with language, or a drive. Solidarity honks dopplered up from the lanes. A block later, I asked I. if we could pause. “I’d like to regard this hole,” I said. Before us was a fenced construction site. Just a muddy foundation plus a couple tools for heavy digging. Behind us, the Pioneer Memorial. It used to be a fort, when California was part of Mexico. The history is fucked up, you should google it, but I’m over my wordcount. Now the commemorative panels show soldiers and families of European descent, like a commemoration to the minting of whiteness vis-a-vis Manifest Destiny. Around the monument walls interstitial weeds grew abundant, the kind of rare green you store up in sense memory for when the dry heat takes over again and rubs that kind of color out.

To parse what’s in front of me, I need to keep listening, reading, staying with, and so the other title of this protest document is Booting Up. After the protest, the protest kept happening online. A friend who is trans posted that the first thing he saw at the LA march was a group of cis women surrounding a trans woman, telling her to give the mic “to a real woman.” I understood, reading that, that the necessary math problem is multiplication not division. We have a chance to make a different kind of story about this historic resistance. I want my account to be inclusive, nuanced, fierce, loving, and allied, but/and I speak from where I’m standing, as a white person, cis-gendered, more or less. In New York, the artist Taeyoon Choi made posters in brushed ink, stating I stand with and then a long list. I’m riffing on his work when I say that at the next march, my sign will read: I stand with trans, indigenous, immigrant, brown, and black lives, against climate violence. I. said their sign would say, The future is non-binary. They borrowed the slogan from a Twitter friend.

Amanda K Davidson 

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Art After Trump

Housing Works Art After Trump

Weird Sister is honored to be co-hosting the Housing Works event Art After Trump.

Thursday, December 15, 5:00pm
Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, 126 Crosby Street, New York

Including Weird Sister performers Marisa Crawford, Cathy de la Cruz, Naomi Extra, Merve Kayan, and Christopher Soto (aka Loma)

Please save the date for a gathering and marathon-style reading of responses by and for artists and arts organizers. Line-up to be announced. Artists of all disciplines will read their short responses – of any form – to the results of election 2016 and the imminent administration.

Partner organizations will provide information and resources in addition to Housing Works’ bookstore and advocacy and healthcare departments.

Produced by:
Molly Rose Quinn, Director of Public programming, Housing Works Bookstore Cafe
Brandon Stosuy, Editor-in-Chief, The Creative Independent
Glory Edim, founder, Well-Read Black Girl
Jillian Steinhauer, Senior Editor, Hyperallergic
Ben Sisto, Ace Hotel New York Continue reading

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Feeling It: On Basketball Fandom, Empathy, and Learning to Read

We love this post on masculinity, sports, and literacy from our amazing friends at The Peach Basket, a blog featuring poets writing about basketball that you should check out immediately! <3

by Matt L Rohrer:

“Sports provide a rare sanctioned opportunity for men to express emotions besides anger. When I was a valet parker in my teens I remember my macho boss speaking openly about crying in his room when the A’s were eliminated from the playoffs. We didn’t judge him. We just nodded our heads and laughed a little. We were secretly rooting for him. Sports are vessels that equally display our peak capabilities and limitations. We watch and play not just because games are thrilling, beautiful, and occasionally cruel, but because we want to feel. We experience our failures and moments of grace. We get close to our desires, close to the pain of knowing some of them will never actualize.”

Read the full piece here on The Peach Basket.

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