Acts of Resistance collects Clarke's iconic essays, correspondence with Barbara Smith, captivating new poetry, and more!

These times urgently need Cheryl Clarke and her brilliant mind and words. Clarke’s sharp, clear-eyed, forceful, and poetic essays offer readers both balm and provocation to action— and they continue to resonate in the current political landscape. Clarke is a towering figure in the worlds of poetry, feminist and queer theory, and lesbian, feminist, and queer communities. She has been writing and thinking with and in her communities for over fifty years. Her work is prescient, classic, and timeless.

Acts of Resistance gathers Clarke’s most beloved essays alongside archival finds and recent poems. Many of Clarke’s most influential essays, including “Lesbianism: an Act of Resistance” and “The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community,” first appeared in landmark publications such as This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981) and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983). These essays and others defined generations of lesbian, feminist, and queer thinkers, writers and activists. Discover—or revisit—the inimitable Cheryl Clarke through Acts of Resistance.

Praise for Acts of Resistance:
“Cheryl Clarke’s ongoing gumption continues to ask us how loudly and proudly will we do what we do.”
— Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Cheryl Clarke is a poet, critic, and activist born in Washington, DC. She earned her degrees from Howard University and Rutgers University. Clarke is the author of five collections of poetry: Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women (1983), Living as a Lesbian (1986), Humid Pitch (1989), Experimental Love (1993), By My Precise Haircut (2016), which won a Hilary Tham Capital Competition, and Archives of Style: New and Selected Poems (2024). She wrote the critical study “ After Mecca” : Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement (2005), and the essay collection The Days of Good Looks: Prose and Poetry of Cheryl Clarke, 1980– 2005 (2006). Clarke served as co-editor of Conditions, “a feminist journal of writing, with an emphasis on writing by lesbians.” She currently lives in Hobart, New York, where, with her partner, Barbara J. Balliet, she owns and operates Blenheim Hill Books.

Press Kit for Acts of Resistance.