Sister Spit was a lesbian-feminist spoken-word and performance art collective based in San Francisco, signed to Mr. Lady Records. They formed in 1994 and disbanded in 2006. Founding members included Michelle Tea and Sini Anderson, Other members included Jane LeCroy and poet Eileen Myles. The group were noted for their Ramblin' Roadshow, performing at feminist events such as the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. The Boston Phoenix described it as "the coolest (and cutest) line-up of talented, tattooed, pierced, and purple-pigtailed performance artists the Bay Area has to offer." [1]
The Independent Weekly magazine described the group as a "literary celebration of outspoken and courageous feminists". [2] Sister Spit performed on numerous occasions at the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, as well as on multiple tours across the United States, chiefly to LGBT audiences, including the Castro Street Fair, Pride and Ladyfest in San Francisco. [3] They played at such locations as Boston, Cambridge, Massachusetts and Buffalo, New York. [4]
Michelle Tea revived the tour in April 2007, calling the new incarnation Sister Spit: The Next Generation. The new group includes original Sister Spitters Eileen Myles and Ali Liebegott, as well as younger writers such as Cristy Road, Nicole Georges, and Rhiannon Argo. [5]
For a month on the road, Sister Spit: The Next Generation traveled across the U.S. and Canada, and occasionally through Europe, performing mainly at universities and art centers. In order to reflect changes in gender identity and sexual orientation, the line-up no longer includes only women. Performers have included Nicole Georges, Cristy Road, Eileen Myles, Beth Lisick, Blake Nelson, Justin Vivian Bond and Ariel Schrag.
In 2017, the 20th Anniversary Sister Spit tour included Denise Benavides, Virgie Tovar, Maya Songbird, Celeste Chan, Cathy de la Cruz, Juliana Delgado Lopera and Joshua Jennifer Espinoza. [6]
In 2012 Sister Spit made the long-desired leap from promoting and supporting up-and-coming queer, feminist writers to actually shepherding them into print via a collaboration with City Lights Publishers. The new imprint, City Lights/Sister Spit, began by publishing the anthology Sister Spit: Writing, Rants and Reminiscence from the Road. Subsequently, it has published works by Ali Liebegott, Beth Lisick, and others. In their 40th-anniversary issue, Ms. magazine named the anthology a "great read" of the season that honors the cultural institution that is the Sister Spit roadshow.
The mission of the City Lights/Sister Spit imprint is to publish primarily but not exclusively writings that are informed by a queer, feminist outsider perspectives. [7] Editor Michelle Tea wishes to nurture work from people who struggle to find a place. [8]
Sister Spit had a rotating membership. Members for many or all shows included [9]
Alix L. Olson is an American poet who works exclusively in spoken word. She uses her work to address issues of capitalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, heterosexism, misogyny, and patriarchy. She identifies as a queer feminist.
Eileen Myles is a LAMBDA Literary Award-winning American poet and writer who has produced more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, libretti, plays, and performance pieces over the last three decades. Novelist Dennis Cooper has described Myles as "one of the savviest and most restless intellects in contemporary literature." The Boston Globe described them as "that rare creature, a rock star of poetry." In 2012, Myles received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete Afterglow, which gives both a real and fantastic account of a dog's life. Myles uses they/them pronouns.
Michelle Tea is an American author, poet, and literary arts organizer whose autobiographical works explore queer culture, feminism, race, class, sex work, and other topics. She is originally from Chelsea, Massachusetts and has identified with the San Francisco, California literary and arts community for many years. She currently lives in Los Angeles. Her books, mostly memoirs, are known for their exposition of the queercore community.
Lesbian literature is a subgenre of literature addressing lesbian themes. It includes poetry, plays, fiction addressing lesbian characters, and non-fiction about lesbian-interest topics. A similar term is sapphic literature, encompassing works that feature love between women that are not necessarily lesbian.
The IHOP Papers is the debut novel of American author Ali Liebegott, and was first published on December 13, 2006, by Carroll & Graf. The story revolves around a twenty-year-old lesbian named Francesca who falls in love with her female philosophy professor in junior college. Francesca eventually moves to San Francisco in order to be with her. The novel explores Francesca's difficulty with intimate relationships, as she experiences numerous lesbian relationships in San Francisco. The title of the book is a reference to the San Franciscan IHOP restaurant where she is employed.
Ali Liebegott is an American writer, actor, and comedian. She is best known for her work as a novelist and a writer/producer on the Amazon original series Transparent. Liebegott has taught creative writing at University of California, San Diego and Mills College. She is a recipient of a Poetry Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is the author of The Beautifully Worthless; The IHOP Papers; and Cha-Ching!. Liebegott resides in Los Angeles and recently finished her fourth book, The Summer of Dead Birds.
Lenelle Moïse is a poet, actress and playwright born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Currently based in the United States, she performs at colleges throughout the country, presenting work about race, gender, class, immigration and sexuality. Her spoken word CD Madivinez won the 2007 Patchwork Majority Radio Album Award for Best Solo Album. Moïse was a member of the permanent ensemble cast in the Culture Project's premiere production of Rebel Voices, a play by Rob Urbinati based on Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove's book Voices of a People's History of the United States. In 2008, she developed a two-person vocal musical about art, infamy and race called EXPATRIATE, also at the Culture Project, in which she co-starred with Karla Cheatham-Mosley. When she was a junior at Ithaca College, Lenelle co-wrote Sexual Dependency, a feature film by Bolivian filmmaker Rodrigo Bellot who was a schoolmate at the time. The film went on to win the International Film Critics' Award at the Locarno International Film Festival in Switzerland. Moïse also wrote and starred in Mara Alper's short experimental video "To Erzulie" which premiered at the Berlin Sommerfest der Literaturen in July 2002. She has completed her own experimental shorts "Blue Passersby Eyes" and "Atlantic Soul." Her homemade music video Pied Piper was an official selection of the International Museum of Women 2007 Online Film Festival. Her essays and poems are published in a number of anthologies, most recently Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders of the Spoken Word Revolution. Her debut book Haiti Glass, part of the Sister Spit series, is a collection of verse and prose. She experiments with collage as a form of meditative practice and nonlinear storytelling.
Belladonna* Collaborative is a small press non-profit publisher and collaborative organization based in Brooklyn, New York City. It was founded in 1999 by Rachel Levitsky as a reading series at Bluestockings in New York, NY. The reading series quickly expanded to a matrix of readings, publications, and informal salons, featuring avant-garde feminist writing, with an emphasis on hybrid and language-focused writing. Currently, the press operates as a non-hierarchical collaborative, publishing books and hosting literary events with attention to diversity in its roster of authors and editorial board.
Kris Kovick was an American writer, cartoonist, and printer based in California.
The Tea Party protests were a series of protests throughout the United States that began in early 2009. The protests were part of the larger political Tea Party movement. Most Tea Party activities have since been focused on opposing efforts of the Obama administration, and on recruiting, nominating, and supporting candidates for state and national elections. The name "Tea Party" is a reference to the Boston Tea Party, whose principal aim was to protest taxation without representation. Tea Party protests evoked images, slogans and themes from the American Revolution, such as tri-corner hats and yellow Gadsden "Don't Tread on Me" flags. The letters T-E-A have been used by some protesters to form the backronym "Taxed Enough Already".
Nicole J. Georges is an American illustrator, writer, zinester, podcaster, and educator. She is well known for authoring the autobiographical comic zine Invincible Summer, whose individual issues have been collected into two anthologies published by Tugboat Press and Microcosm Publishing. Some of her other notable works include the graphic memoirs Calling Dr. Laura and Fetch: How a Bad Dog Brought Me Home. In addition to this, Georges creates comics and teaches others how to make them, produces the Podcast Sagittarian Matters, and illustrates portraits of animals. She currently divides her time between Los Angeles, California and Portland, Oregon.
Rocco Kayiatos, known professionally as Katastrophe and in some later releases as Rocco Katastrophe, is an American rapper.
Sini Anderson is an American film director, producer, performance artist, choreographer, dancer and poet, from Chicago, Illinois. Anderson is widely known for directing The Punk Singer (2013), a documentary about riot grrrl musician Kathleen Hanna's legacy and experience with late-stage Lyme disease.
Chris Hosea is an American poet, artist, and writer.
Cristina Carrera, otherwise known as Cristy C. Road is a Cuban-American illustrator, graphic novelist, and punk rock musician whose posters, music, and autobiographical works explore themes of feminism, queer culture, and social justice. She primarily works as an illustrator and graphic novelist, but also published a long-running zine about punk music and her life as a queer Latina. She performed on the Sister Spit roadshow in 2007, 2009, and 2013 and was the lead vocalist and guitarist for the queercore/pop-punk band, The Homewreckers. She currently sings vocals and plays guitar in Choked Up. She has published three books and one collection of postcards, as well as numerous concert posters, protest flyers, book covers, and logos. Road has worked as a professor at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.
Sabrina Chap is a Brooklyn-based songwriter, cabaret performer, and author. She was born and raised in Elk Grove Village, Illinois. She is the editor of the anthology Live Through This: On Creativity and Self-Destruction. She is most known for her involvement in the neo-burlesque and cabaret scenes as a musician and cabaret performer. Her two cds are Oompa! and We Are the Parade.
Myriam Gurba Serrano is an American author, editor, and visual artist.
Matthew "Matthue" Roth is an American author, poet, columnist, spoken word performer, video game designer, and screenwriter.
JoAnn Elizabeth "Eli" Coppola was an American poet and active contributor to the San Francisco spoken word scene in the mid 1980s and 1990s. She wrote poetry on a variety of subjects including disability, sexuality, and social injustice.
Julián Delgado Lopera is a queer Colombian writer and performer. They are the author of ¡Cuéntamelo! an illustrated collection of queer immigrant histories in the United States during the 1980s. They use creative expressions, such as writing, queer literary performance, and bilingual poetry to advance LGBT activism projects across the Bay Area. Delgado Lopera serves as the Executive/Artistic director for the nonprofit organization Radar Productions since 2015.