Briona Simone Jones

African American lesbian writers and theorists have made extraordinary contributions to feminist theory, activism, and writing over the past 200 years. Mouths of Rain, the companion anthology to Beverly Guy-Sheftall's classic Words of Fire, traces the long history of intellectual thought produced by Black Lesbian writers, spanning the nineteenth century through the twenty-first century. Using “Black Lesbian” as a capacious signifier, Mouths of Rain includes writing by Black women who have shared intimate and loving relationships with other women, as well as Black women who see bonding as mutual, Black women who have self-identified as lesbian, Black women who have written about Black Lesbians, and Black women who theorize about and see the word lesbian as a political descriptor that disrupts and critiques capitalism, heterosexism, and heteropatriarchy. Taking its title from a poem by Audre Lorde, Mouths of Rain, gathers writers including Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Barbara Jordan, and Audre Lorde to address pervasive issues such as misogynoir and anti-blackness while also attending to love, romance, “coming out,” and the erotic. Mouths of Rain brilliantly maps a genealogy of Black lesbian works from the pre-Harlem Renaissance to contemporary writers sparking new modes of thinking about the intellectual inheritance of Black lesbians.