Lesbian-feminist movement pioneer Jeanne Córdova has been fabulous for a long time, organizing, agitating, publishing, speaking out. At last, we can get to know her better in her new book, When We Were Outlaws: A Memoir of Love & Revolution, which garnered a Lammy, a Goldie and a Triangle, making it a triple-crown winner for lesbian writing. [...]
Emily Dickinson’s highly compressed, powerful poems inspire legions of readers, and Dickinson is one of the most widely revered and critically engaged women writers. Dickinson matters, not only to readers but also to scholars. For feminists, however, our understanding of Dickinson as a preeminent poet of the 19th century is only partial. In 1975, poet [...]
Most students can recall at least one point in their academic careers when they found themselves secluded in a corner of the library, coffee in hand, cramming for a big test. University of Wisconsin graduate student Danielle Henderson was in a similar situation, struggling to remember and differentiate among numerous feminist theories. So she came up [...]
In 2009, a gay poet wrote to me, “I just don’t think lesbian poetry is that important.” This wounding statement fueled my engines, and I wrote a series of poems in which I placed my favorite poets in the sky as constellations, beginning with “Sappho the Ram,” and ending with “Jackie Kay the Fish.” When [...]
In The Receptionist: An Education at The New Yorker, Janet Groth provides a pleasurable, well-written story about the love of good writing. The storytelling is personal and accessible, yet replete with detail and sparkling turns of phrase. I even had to look up the meaning of a few words. That’s thrilling in a text so charming [...]
The first time I stepped into Forever 21, I was amazed: A store at the mall actually had clothes I liked, at affordable prices, bearing “Made in the USA” labels! (At the time, I naively believed “Made in the USA” meant sweatshop-free. I later learned this is far from true.) Though I still prefer thrift [...]
For close to 30 years, Marilyn Buck was one of many U.S. political prisoners, a population largely ignored in a country that doesn’t tire of criticizing other nations for imprisoning people for political reasons. A Marxist feminist activist who put her actions where her beliefs were, Buck took part in the struggles that shook this [...]
National Poetry Month may be over, but it’s never too late to recognize a wonderful poet and her poems. On April 19, Minnie Bruce Pratt’s latest collection, Inside the Money Machine, won the 2011 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry from The Publishing Triangle, whose annual Awards honor the best lesbian and gay nonfiction, poetry [...]
Lizz Winstead is a household name for millions who’ve never even heard of her. At the end of each episode of The Daily Show, right after the “Moment of Zen” and at the conclusion of the credits, her name flashes by, like a subliminal advertisement for women’s genius: Created by Madeleine Smithberg and Lizz Winstead. In [...]
Feminist novelist Julia Alvarez (How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies), known for her clear, unaffected prose and her keen sense of justice, applies her powers of observation inward in a new memoir, A Wedding in Haiti. In her most intimate book to date, Alvarez delves into her own [...]
