Launch of The Highest Apple by Judy Grahn

Sinister Wisdom’s Sapphic Classics continue to delight and amaze. The bonus issue this year is a new edition of Judy Grahn’s marvelous book, The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition. This new edition features an expanded section on the work of Pat Parker, a new introduction by Judy Grahn, a foreword by Alyse Knorr, an afterword by Alicia Mountain, and six responses by contemporary to this vital work by a collection of younger poets and writers. Judy Grahn was joined by the contributors to this new edition to celebrate this beloved book on Tuesday, November 28, 2023.

In 1985, Judy Grahn boldly declared that lesbians have a poetic tradition and mapped it from Sappho to the present day in the groundbreaking book The Highest Apple. With her characteristic ferocious intellect, passion for historical research, careful close readings, and dynamic storytelling, Grahn situated poetry by Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Amy Lowell, H.D., Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Rich Paula Gunn Allen, Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, and Olga Bromas as central to lesbian culture-and more radically as central to society as a whole.

In this new and updated edition of The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition, Grahn revisits the original text and amplifies it with a more in depth consideration of Pat Parker and in conversation with two younger lesbian poets, Alicia Mountain and Alyse Knorr, demonstrating the continued relevance and dynamism of The Highest Apple. A new introduction by Grahn and six responses by contemporary poets Donika Kelly, Kim Shuck, Serena Chopra, Zoe Tuck, Saretta Morgan, and Khadijah Queen highlight the ongoing significance of The Highest Apple to readers, writers, and thinkers.

Judy Grahn is an internationally-recognized poet, writer, and social theorist. She is the author of fourteen books including the groundbreaking Another Mother Tongue, Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World, and most recently, A Simple Revolution. Eruptions of Inanna, and Hanging on Our Own Bones. Her website is www.commonalityinstitute.org.

(The Highest Apple)

The Highest Apple Media Kit
LIVE from NYPL: Lesbian Poetic Traditions: Judy Grahn, Julie R. Enszer, JP Howard, and Alicia Mountain