Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Seattle

Freelance Writer at Freelance

New novel, TERRY DACTYL, out November 11 from Coffee House in the US and Cipher in the UK!!! Also: TOUCHING THE ART, THE FREEZER DOOR +++

Articles

New Oral History Captures Decades of Trans Life in the Words of Elders of Color

1 month ago | truthout.org | Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore |Merula Furtado

We are living in a time of intense anti-trans backlash.
Solidarity Is the Core of Our Movements - It’s Also Messier Than We Often Admit

2 months ago | portside.org | Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Solidarity Is the Core of Our Movements — It’s Also Messier Than We Often Admit Published April 19, 2025 “We are all led to solidarity by a complicated array of emotional, political, material and coincidental experiences,” novelist, activist and AIDS historian Sarah Schulman told me recently as we discussed her new book, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity.
Solidarity Is the Core of Our Movements - It’s Also Messier Than We Often Admit

2 months ago | znetwork.org | Sarah Schulman |Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

“We are all led to solidarity by a complicated array of emotional, political, material and coincidental experiences,” novelist, activist and AIDS historian Sarah Schulman told me recently as we discussed her new book, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity. “What really matters in the end is what we conclude from all these influences.”Her reflections on the importance of solidarity are timely in this moment, as solidarity with Palestinians has become increasingly criminalized.
Review of Ripcord by Nate Lippens

Oct 22, 2024 | foglifterjournal.com | Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

“I’m in an abusive relationship with time,” Nate Lippens writes, in Ripcord, his second novel, a rumination on failed relationships, art, aging, lust, friendship, exile, loss, hierarchy, death, and survival. The narrator is an unnamed middle-aged queen who works as a bartender at a gay bar in Milwaukee, aptly named the Dilly Dally.
In New AIDS Activist Memoir, Keiko Lane Aims to Articulate the Inexpressible

Sep 17, 2024 | truthout.org | Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

When I was working on my most recent anthology, Between Certain Death and a Possible Future: Queer Writing on Growing Up with the AIDS Crisis, I received a submission from Keiko Lane about joining ACT UP and Queer Nation in Los Angeles as a 16-year-old Okinawan American lesbian in 1990.
New Biography Opens a Portal Into the Life and Work of Audre Lorde

Aug 26, 2024 | znetwork.org | Alexis Gumbs |Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

In Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, Alexis Pauline Gumbs offers an erudite, meticulously researched biography of the legendary Black lesbian feminist poet that simultaneously functions as homage, incantation, critical inquiry, collective exploration and poetic evocation.
New Biography Opens a Portal Into the Life and Work of Audre Lorde

Aug 25, 2024 | truthout.org | Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

In Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, Alexis Pauline Gumbs offers an erudite, meticulously researched biography of the legendary Black lesbian feminist poet that simultaneously functions as homage, incantation, critical inquiry, collective exploration and poetic evocation.
Remembering Grandmother: Art, Abuse and a Fraught Legacy

Apr 4, 2024 | indypendent.org | Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore |Eleanor Bader |Charlie Stephens

When Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore was a child, every visit to see her paternal grandparents was filled with affirmation, joy and wonder. Her grandmother, visual artist Glady Goldstein, was particularly encouraging. She helped nurture Sycamore’s burgeoning creativity and envision a way to break free of suburban expectations. Her example was potent.
Graffiti Gentrification: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore on the Exploitation of Basquiat

Nov 29, 2023 | lithub.com | Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Image courtesy Magnolia PicturesIs the point of art to bring us into ourselves, or out? I mean the Parkway theater is my favorite place to go to get out of the heat—I can even stare at the high-concept magenta wallpaper in the bathrooms, digitized popcorn kernels “oating” by. Or notice the shining light outside as it settles over the decaying turn-of-the-century buildings across Charles Street, all those gorgeous reds and browns and look at those plants growing through the cracks in the bricks.
A Writer’s Memorial to a Lover, and an Era, Lost to AIDS

Nov 14, 2023 | nytimes.com | Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore |Robert Gluck

ABOUT ED, by Robert Glück“I started this book two decades ago,” Robert Glück tells us in his new novel, “About Ed,” “so now it has turned into a ritual to prepare for death, and an obsession to put between death and myself.” The book recounts his relationship with the artist Ed Aulerich-Sugai, Glück’s lover for most of the 1970s and a close friend until Ed’s death from AIDS in 1994.