An Interview with Courtney Thorsson, Author of The Sisterhood
By Jordan A. Rothacker
The title of this interview is the first line from the song “Year of the Boomerang” on Rage Against the Machine’s 1996 album Evil Empire. The lyrics were constantly in my head while I read The Sisterhood and prepared to meet Thorsson; they align with this book as it reminds me that the unseen, unacknowledged, and unappreciated labor of women is also present in revolutionary movements. And that this unseen presence is often in leadership. The anthem I actively listened to while reading this book is a version of Woody Guthrie’s “All You Fascists,” recorded by Rhiannon Giddens and the Resistance Revival Chorus on the debut album This Joy, which brings a force, power, and beauty to the song that I’ve never heard before.
The full title of Thorsson’s book is The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture. Courtney Thorsson is a professor of English at the University of Oregon with a specialty in African American Literature and Cultural Studies. She holds a Doctorate and Masters from Columbia University; her first book, Women’s Work: Nationalism and Contemporary African Women’s Novels, came out with Virginia University Press in 2013.
The Sisterhood was published in 2023, and today, on the eve of the paperback release, it is still receiving accolades. It is the Literary Freedom Project’s “One Book One Bronx” selection for 2025; in January it received Honorable Mention in the William Sanders Scarborough Prize competition of the Modern Language Association. It’s currently a finalist (winners to be announced in April) for the 2025 Oregon Book Award in non-fiction.
There is a black-and-white photograph on the book cover that is also repeated opposite the title page. In the photograph, eight Black women pose—some standing, some seated—along a wall that bears a sole framed photograph of the blues singer Bessie Smith. The group was founded in February 1977 at June Jordan’s apartment and continued for two years with monthly meetings, minutes taken, and dues paid by all.
The membership carried across various disciplines and mediums and was quite illustrious. June Jordan, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Ntozake Shange, Vertamae Grosvenor, Nana Maynard, Lori Sharpe, and Audreen Ballard are all in the picture to either side of the framed photograph of Bessie Smith. Membership also included Audrey Edwards, Audre Lorde, Renita Weems, Judith Wilson, Rosa Guy, Paule Marshall, Zita Allen, VèVè Clark, Phyl Garland, Jessica Harris, Margo Jefferson, Patricia Spears Jones, Susan McHenry, and a few others, totalling around 30 poets, playwrights, novelists, academics, journalists, editors, food historians, and editors.
Thorsson’s detailed and rigorous historical and textual research frame the story of this group around three arguments: first, that “the Sisterhood is both a model for Black Feminist collaboration and a cautionary tale;” second, that “the group’s collaborative labor in the 1970s dramatically increased the visibility of African American women writers, especially novelists, in the 1980s;” and, third, “the Sisterhood is a story of shifting relationships among political organizations, literature, and the academy.”
The book charts the activities of the group leading up to its first meeting and then beyond, giving an overall progression from political organizing into literary organizing and ultimately into the academia of colleges and universities. The Sisterhood is not just a work of history, or specifically literary history; it is a call to action at a time when the gains of these brave and brilliant women are being directly attacked through racist, sexist, classist, and ableist scapegoating of DEI initiatives. I recommending reading this book and letting it lead you.
In March of 2024, I sat down with Courtney Thorsson in Jittery Joe’s in downtown Athens, Georgia to talk about The Sisterhood.
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Jordan A. Rothacker: Did you listen to Bessie Smith while writing and researching? What else inspired you, music-wise?
JAR: So you don’t listen to music at all when you’re researching?
CT: I don’t. And also, a lot, a great deal of the research with this book happened in various archives of library repositories. So, not situations where music would necessarily be appropriate. But Ntozake Shange’s papers at Barnard are the closest to a place where you can imagine some music. Yeah. It’s a really fun welcoming space. And there’s often an altar to Shange set up in the research area. Which is kind of the opposite of visiting Tony Morrison’s papers at Princeton, where I had to wash and dry my hands in front of an archivist before entering the reading room, which I respect—but those are not music playing situations, and when I write, I don’t listen to music.
JAR: What is this class that you teach that has both Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith?
CT: This year (2024), I’m teaching two incarnations of Poetry of Black liberation. It’s a 100-level kind of intro to literature class in our Clark Honors College at University of Oregon. And it’s great. I began teaching it in the fall of 2023, which was the first time in years that I had a class of first-year, first-term students, you know, kids who just got to college. And the group who would take a course in the poetry of Black liberation is pretty self-selecting and fabulous, as you might imagine. I’m going to teach it again in the spring and really focus on lateral transfer students who might be transferring in from community college and need that 100-level humanities course. The way that class works is each week we read a cluster of poems about one figure in the long struggle for Black liberation by poets of different races, genders, nation, time period, whatever. So we did a week on Toussaint L’Ouverture and we read William Wordsworth’s 1803 Sonnet and John Greenleaf Whittier’s 1833 abolitionist poem about Toussaint. It works that way. And we do a day of poems about Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith.
JAR: What you pull off so deftly here in The Sisterhood is a difficult hybridity of research and writing. It combines historical/archival research with literary/textual research. Why was this methodology necessary?
CT: I am a literary scholar. My PhD is in English and comparative literature. I am an expert in African American literature, and a close reading of texts and careful attention to textual detail in order to make interpretive arguments is what I normally do on the page. So, this obviously is a little bit different. And it is not a group biography. It’s really an interpretive cultural history and a story of aftereffects and ripples. So that means a couple of things. First, the archival research is necessary because this is really the last generation of Black women to leave behind a robust paper archive. So even, you know, email. But by the end of her life, let’s say, Toni Morrison was communicating primarily via text message, which we’re never going to see. That’s not going to be part of an archive. So that’s just a matter of medium. Historically, you know, for Black women’s archives to be available, the writer herself has to believe that they’re valuable and save them and a repository has to be interested in them. That repository has to have enough support to take care of them. By the time of her own passing, Vertamae Grosvenor had not only lost all of her paper archives to hurricanes and moves, but when I spoke to her, before she passed, she didn’t even have any copies or any way to watch her own PBS program. She hosted The America’s Family Kitchen. I was sending a set of DVDs to her so she could even look back on her own archive because she didn’t have copies of it.
So, one thing is, as we see more broadly with attacks on libraries right now, using archives is a way to ensure that they get preserved and circulated, but also, as I say, because this is the last generation of women to have this kind of dense paper archive. But it’s also really dispersed. It’s not as though every one of the over 30 women who attended one or more meetings of the Sisterhood has an archive and a repository somewhere; fewer than half of them do. So it’s also about hunting down someone’s letters in someone else’s archive. So that’s one piece. And an important part of the archival piece is the textual documentation of things like agendas, meeting minutes, and official correspondence for the group.
This was not, as so many captions have said on this photo, a group of Black women writers who got together informally in the seventies. This was a group that named themselves “The Sisterhood” and capitalized it in everything they wrote from the first meeting on. It was a structured, regular group of women at work. So, the archival piece is important for that as well, I think. I would say it’s not so much a biographical piece as a cultural storytelling piece. And that’s important in terms of understanding what was possible in the moment of history in the late 1970s when these women came together. And really, it’s about convincing readers that some of the things that people thought were possible in the seventies might still be possible today.
JAR: You say that this is not a group biography—is it more a biography of a group, or a movement?
CT: I don’t know what the right genre is. And, you know, as I say, I’m a literary scholar. I’ve seen plenty of people refer to me as a historian in writing since this book came out, which I am not and which feels really strange. I think that people are going to attach the word biography to it no matter what. What you say is right: it’s not a biography, it’s not a group biography, but it is a biography of a group. And it’s a biography of a group in deep historical, political, literary, and other cultural contexts.
JAR: As a white woman, what draws you to African American studies?
CT: I mean, there’s a variety of answers, which is to say it’s just like what anybody else does. We don’t ask people who aren’t Irish why they read James Joyce. We don’t ask people who are alive why they care about medieval literature [laughs], you know? I mean, for me, it’s like why wouldn’t anyone want to study it? It’s hard for me to understand why anybody wouldn’t choose to study African American literature. To some extent it’s just what grabs you and interests you. I was a double major in English and African American studies. My undergraduate thesis was about narrative temporality in Zora Neale Hurston.
When I applied to graduate schools, I only applied to places that had a robust Black studies or African American studies unit with the plan of at least initially thinking about James Baldwin. My Master’s thesis is about James Baldwin’s Another Country.
In general, I’m not really out to have people look at me. I’m ambivalent about the many incarnations of standpoint in epistemology. But, I don’t want anybody to wonder or be confused. So, I tend to name my whiteness. I thought it was necessary in the case of this book. It’s also the case that I am a white person teaching African American literature at a predominantly white institution. And so, I think that there are certain kinds of responsibilities that come with that. There’s a layered set of responsibilities as a teacher and researcher and so on.
JAR: As a white woman, what strategies do you employ to position or re-position yourself in these spaces of scholarship?
CT: Well, for me, rigor is always the answer. Rigor is the way I show love. So, there’s some kind of balance between love and rigor toward my objects of study. Which is to say, I don’t write about books I don’t like. I don’t study bad objects. I don’t teach things that I think are bad objects. I think lots of scholars do, and there can be utility to that. But mainly I study, teach, and write about works of African American literature that I think have political utility and are beautiful and important and can sustain us and our students in fights for justice or console us or challenge us. For me, seriousness and rigor are the answer. I tell my students all the time that this is not about personal experience. This is not about being down. This is about expertise.
JAR: What impact do you hope this book will have on the public and the future of scholarship?
CT: I’m just a regular English professor, so I am totally blown away by the number of people who are interested in this book and super heartened by it, really grateful. The first thing is, it seems like this book is finding readers and I’m really happy. What I hope is that it makes readers read and study more works by members of the Sisterhood. One thing I want the book to do for readers is give them some context. And this is what everything I do is about: to read, reread, and more deeply understand beautiful, important political works by Black women writers. That is the point of my job, my work, whether it’s on the page, in the classroom, whatever. And also, in terms of scholarship, I do hope some people will read this book and decide to write the Atlanta version of this story, like the Southern Collective of African American Writers. James Smethurst has a little bit on it in his book Behold the Land, but there’s not really any work on it. I want someone to look at this [The Sisterhood] and say, oh, this is a way to do this. I want this book to encourage people to write the same book about Boston, LA, or Berkeley. Chicago or Atlanta. And make people read, reread, and more deeply understand works of African American literature.
