Belladonna‘s mission is to promote the work of women writers who are adventurous, experimental, politically involved, multi-form, multicultural, multi-gendered, impossible to define, unpredictable, and dangerous with language. Belladonna has featured nearly 300 writers of wildly diverse backgrounds, writers who work in and between multiple forms, languages, and critical fields. As performance and as printed text, the work gathers over time and space, forming a conversation about the feminist avant-garde, what it is, and how it comes to be. Belladonna* is committed to building publication and literary community between women-identified and genderqueer writers who write off-center—poetry and prose that is political and critical, that is situational rather than plot-driven, that is inter-subjective or performative or witnessing rather than personally revelatory, that reaches across the boundaries and binaries of literary genre and artistic fields, and that questions the gender binary.

Belladonna* is a feminist avant-garde collective, founded in 1999 by Rachel Levitsky. Belladonna* started as a reading and salon series at Bluestocking’s Women’s Bookstore on New York City’s Lower East Side. In June 2000, in collaboration with Boog Literature, Belladonna* began to publish commemorative “chaplets” (defined as short chapbooks of immediate writing or work-in-progress) of the readers’ work. This series continues today and has reached well beyond #200.