The Belladonna Elders

Poetry. LGBT Studies. Limited Edition. In this special series of eight perfect-bound books, each book is an anthology and a conversation between the guest curator and the elder(s) she hosts. In ELDERS SERIES #7, Cara Benson hosts Jayne Cortez and Anne Waldman. Belladonna* has featured over 150 writers of wildly diverse age and origin, writers who work in conversation and collaboration within and between multiple forms, languages, and critical fields. 2009 marked the tenth anniversary of their mission to promote the work of women writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-form, multicultural, multi-gendered, impossible to define, delicious to talk about, unpredictable, and dangerous with language. As performance and as printed text, the work collects, gathers over time and space, and forms a kind of conversation about the feminist avant garde: what it is and how it comes to be. The anniversary ELDERS SERIES is a continuation of this conversation, which highlights the fact of influence and continuity of the ideas, poetics, and concerns we circle through.