Ms. Muse: Melissa Studdard on the Power of Poetry to Create the World We Want

Ms. Muse is a discovery place for riotous, righteous and resonant feminist poetry that nourishes and gives voice to a rising tide of female resistance.

How do you redeem a woman’s worst nightmare lived—or at least one of them? How do you give a mute, silenced or dead woman a voice? These are a few of the questions answered by Melissa Studdard’s poems.

“after I died / I put my clothes back on. / Like women do. / When everything has been taken.”

‘The Second Half’: Ellen Warner’s Portraits of Life Over 50

Over the course of 15 years, Ellen Warner—American photojournalist, portrait photographer and author—interviewed and photographed women from different cultures about life after age 50. These women ranged from an author and translator in Connecticut, to a sacred healer in Indonesia, a doctor in Saudi Arabia, a retired cook in Antigua, and the first French woman TV anchor.

These photos will be on display at the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., part of a solo art exhibition titled, “The Second Half: Forty Women Reveal Life After Fifty,” on view from Sept. 30 to Oct. 29, 2022.