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.

“A fascinating, empowering look at how Black women writers collaborated to move their own needle in the publishing industry and academia.”
- Library Journal 

“A scintillating snapshot of a significant moment in American literature.”
- Publisher’s Weekly

“Richly detailed . . . A well-documented contribution to Black literary history.”
- Kirkus Reviews

“Looking back over the past fifty years, it is evident that the social advocacy and artistic accomplishments of the women at the heart of [Imani Perry’s] Sing a Black Girl's Song and The Sisterhood not only shifted literary culture, but also inspired the voices of succeeding generations. The strength of both these books is their ability to take us back in time and to share with us those quieter moments--an unpublished poem or a conversation in someone's New York City apartment--that nurtured a close-knit community and transformed society.”
- Harvey Young, the Times Literary Supplement

“Starting with a photograph, Courtney Thorsson brings her all to this luminous work about The Sisterhood, a group of Black women writers who met informally in the 1970s. Together they transformed American literature and helped to shape generations of writers, visual artists, filmmakers, and scholars. This is a profoundly important story and it has found an astute and sensitive author in Thorsson.”
- Farah Jasmine Griffin, author of In Search of a Beautiful Freedom: New and Selected Essays

“Proceeding from an archive of one iconic photograph of The Sisterhood, 1977, Courtney Thorsson has pieced together the story of how Black women writers, in intimate and collaborative gatherings throughout New York in the 1970s, created literary history. It is an indispensable, fascinating and original history and one that might have been lost without Thorsson’s loving and meticulous archival work.”
- Mary Helen Washington, author of The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s

“If a picture is worth a thousand words, then the photograph that inspired Courtney Thorsson’s immensely perceptive The Sisterhood should be valued in the millions. The Black women who made up “the Sisterhood” represented the greatest creative minds of the last half century. Today we see them as literary “Super Friends,” but back in 1977 many were struggling artists whose friendship, generosity, and support for one another enabled them all to fly. And the literary, cultural, political, and academic worlds we now inhabit are better for it.”
- Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

“The Sisterhood offers an indispensable history of Black women’s writing and organizing. Thorsson’s painstakingly researched story of The Sisterhoodreaches far beyond the now-famous 1977 photo on the book's cover. In these tenderly written pages, Thorsson reveals an entire history of contemporary Black feminism and the writers, editors, organizers, and dreamers who shepherded it. This is an essential contribution to Black feminist thought and American literary history.”
- Erica R. Edwards, author of The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of US Empire

One of the “Most Anticipated Books” of 2023. - The Millions

“30 books we can’t wait to read this fall” and “18 best nonfiction books” of 2023. - Los Angeles Times

“Must-Read Book of Fall 2023" and “Best Books to Read This November.” - Town and Country

“Work that Sparks Conversation." - Association of University Presses

Top 12 books of 2023. - Seminary Co-op Bookstore

The Best Black History Books of 2023 - Black Perspectives

The Ultimate Holiday Gift Guide. - TheGrio

In Women’s Work, Courtney Thorsson reconsiders the gender, genre, and geography of African American nationalism as she explores the aesthetic history of African American writing by women. Building on and departing from the Black Arts Movement, the literary fiction of such writers as Toni Cade Bambara, Paule Marshall, Gloria Naylor, Ntozake Shange, and Toni Morrison employs a cultural nationalism―practiced by their characters as "women's work"―that defines a distinct contemporary literary movement, demanding attention to the continued relevance of nation in post–Black Arts writing. Identifying five forms of women's work as organizing, dancing, mapping, cooking, and inscribing, Thorsson shows how these writers reclaimed and revised cultural nationalism to hail African America.

Women’s Work is a substantive, deeply learned, and provocative contribution to the study of an important body of literature. Teasing out the strands in novels where black women’s multifaceted creative work involves the theorizing of U.S. and diasporic nationhood, Thorsson provides a clearly written, intellectually rewarding, well-documented investigation of emphases of post–civil rights, post–Black Power feminist cultural concerns.
- Michael Awkward, University of Michigan

Thorsson’s research is extensive and reflects her exploration of how African American women’s writing provides a framework for bringing theory to practice. The real value of the study rests in its exploration of the process of nation-making as an individual and a communal endeavor that cannot exist as a solely masculinist enterprise . . . Women’s Work is a nuanced and important work that, to borrow Thorsson’s words, is a potent "teller of cultural narratives."
- Studies in the Novel

[A] very good and compelling book... [A]mong Women’s Work’s welcome contributions to African American literary studies is its painstaking attention to some of the most challenging, least studied works by these authors, including Sassafras, Praisesong, and Paradise.
- American Literary History

Courtney Thorsson makes bold arguments and examines texts by foundational twentieth century AfricanAmerican women authors in Women’s Work . . .T his text is artfully written, rigorously researched, and the author’s approachable writing style does not diminish the complexity of her analyses.
- Journal of American Culture

As scholars increasingly reconsider the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s,Courtney Thorsson’s Women’s Work stands at the cutting edge of scholarship that assesses thelegacy of that movement for black women writers.... Above all, Women’s Work is among the best demonstrations I know of the idea that literature can "do work in the world."
- Novel

[Women's Work] revises and expands our understanding of nationhood, black feminism, and the role of literary form in constructions of nation and identity.
- Modern Fiction Studies