Novelist, poet, theorist, and activist, Monique Wittig (1935–2003) burst onto the literary scene with her novel, The Opoponax, in 1964, which won the Medicis Prize and the attention of writers of the French New Wave. Her second novel, Les Guérillères, was written against the backdrop of the May 1968 student and worker revolt. In 1970, she co-founded the Women’s Liberation Movement (MLF) in France and penned its manifesto. Despite her activism, Wittig was sidelined from the MLF due to her resolute advocacy of lesbianism within materialist feminist discourse. In the mid-’70s, soon after publishing the formally radical The Lesbian Body, Wittig relocated to the United States with her partner, Sande Zeig, with whom she co-wrote Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary. Living in Northern California, she wrote the novel Across the Acheron, the political essays collected in The Straight Mind and Other Essays, a novella, a play, and two film scripts. She taught as a visiting professor at a variety of colleges, later joining the faculty of the University of Arizona. Widely published from the 1960s to the 1990s, her work is now animating a new wave of feminist and queer thought.

Photo credit: Collette Geoffrey

Sande Zeig is an independent filmmaker who has directed and produced seven films, including Central Park, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, 1994; The Girl, based on a story by Monique Wittig, 2001, which premiered at the Toronto and Berlin Film Festivals; Soul Masters, 2008; Apache 8, broadcast on PBS, 2011; Sister Jaguar’s Journey, 2015; The Living Saint of Thailand, 2019; and Firelighters: Fire Is Medicine, broadcast on PBS November 2024. She is currently completing Wittig, Yes!, a feature-length documentary. Zeig collaborated with Monique Wittig on the book Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary, the play The Constant Journey, and the film The Girl.

Photo credit: Nina Mistry

Alice Centamore is a researcher, editor, and occasional translator whose work explores material and literary articulations of queer communal life through poetry, prose, and experimental forms. They were the co-editor of f Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body (1973) and Across the Acheron (1985), now republished by Winter Editions. They are currently working on a facsimile edition of The Blatant Image, a 1980s feminist photographic magazine, and a volume on writer and reproductive health activist Judith Arcana.

Paola Bacchetta is Professor and Chair of the Department of Gender and Women's Studies at University of California, Berkeley. She was the first Chair of the Gender Consortium at Berkeley. She lived in Paris for about half of her life, where as an activist she was a member of the Lesbian Archives (ARCL) and the Maison des Femmes de Paris (Paris Women’s Center) where Monique Wittig regularly visited when she came to Paris. Bacchetta was first introduced to Wittig as a graduate student and activist in Paris and has been teaching Wittig’s work throughout her career. She draws on Wittig’s theorizations in her research and writing. Bacchetta’s books include: Co-Motion: Re-Thinking Power, Subjects and Feminist and Queer Alliances for Our Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2026); Fatima Mernissi for Our Times, co-edited with Minoo Moallem (New York: Syracuse University Press, 2025); Global Raciality: Empire, Postcoloniality, and Decoloniality, co-edited with Sunaina Maira, Howard Winant (New York: Routledge, 2019); Femminismi Queer Postcoloniali, co-edited with Laura Fantone (Verona, Italy: Ombre Corte, 2023, 2015); Gender in the Hindu Nation(Delhi, India: Women Ink, 2004); Right-Wing Women: From Conservatives to Extremists around the World, co-edited with Margaret Power (New York: Routledge, 2002). She has published over 90 articles and book chapters on: lesbian and queer of color theories, activisms, artivisms; feminist queer decolonial theory; gender, sexuality and right-wing movements (India, France, U.S.). She is a longtime activist in lesbian, queer, anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialism, and anti-racism movements. She is co-director of Decolonizing Sexualities Network.

Trinh Lê is a poet and community archivist attending to the spiritual materials of lesbian life. They are the author of Everything is Illuminated in its Dying, forthcoming from Host Publications. Trinh’s multidisciplinary work has been supported by the Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center, the Academy of American Poets, Naropa University, and the San Francisco Public Library. Their poetry can be found in The Tiny, The Ana, and elsewhere. Trinh received her MFA from San Francisco State University, where she now assists in the archives at the Poetry Center.