Fuck Yeah, Women Writers!

womenwhokickass: Nnedi Okorafor: Why she kicks ass “When a...

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 17:55:43 -0400

Nnedi Okorafor: Why she kicks ass

“When a story comes to me, I have to write it or it won’t let me rest,” Okorafor said. “The characters are real to me. I hear their voices. Their actions affect me. The places I write about exist. I’ve felt the sting of their sand storms and smelled their forests. The creatures really do bite, snarl, sing, spit, sting, etc. When I’m writing, I’m there and I enjoy being there.”

She is a Nigerian-American writer of fantasy, science fiction, and speculative fiction. Her novels and stories reflect both her West African heritage and her American life.

Okorafor has received a 2001 Hurston-Wright literary award, the winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa, the Carl Brandon Parallax Award, a Booksense Pick for Winter 2007/2008, a Tiptree Honor Book, the Andre Norton Award, the Golden Duck Award, an NAACP Image Award nominee, the 2011 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, the 2011 Tiptree Honor Book and the 2007–08 winner of the Macmillan Writer’s Prize for Africa.

Her short stories have been published in anthologies and magazines, including Dark Matter II, Strange Horizons, Moondance magazine, and Writers of the Future Volume XVIII.

In 2009, she donated her archive to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) Collection of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the Northern Illinois University Library.

Her fiction has been called “highly original” and “endlessly imaginative”.and has been favorably compared to that of Octavia Butler and Nalo Hopkinson for her deft blending of contemporary and traditional themes and forms. Reviews of her writing praise her courageous female characters and her breath-taking descriptions.

tranqualizer: mydaywithd: Women are powerful and dangerous. -...

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 13:12:38 -0500

tranqualizer:

mydaywithd:

Women are powerful and dangerous.

- NEW SMYRNA BEACH, FL - 1983: Caribbean-American writer, poet and activist Audre Lorde lectures students at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. Lorde was a Master Artist in Residence at the Central Florida arts center in 1983. (Photo by Robert Alexander/Archive Photos/Getty Images) 1983 Robert Alexander

A self-styled “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” writer Audre Lorde dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing the injustices of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Her poetry, and “indeed all of her writing,” according to contributor Joan Martin inBlack Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, ”rings with passion, sincerity, perception, and depth of feeling.” Concerned with modern society’s tendency to categorize groups of people, Lorde fought the marginalization of such categories as “lesbian” and “black woman,” thereby empowering her readers to react to the prejudice in their own lives. While the widespread critical acclaim bestowed upon Lorde for dealing with lesbian topics made her a target of those opposed to her radical agenda, she continued, undaunted, to express her individuality, refusing to be silenced. As she told interviewer Charles H. Rowell in Callaloo: ”My sexuality is part and parcel of who I am, and my poetry comes from the intersection of me and my worlds… . [White, arch-conservative senator] Jesse Helms’s objection to my work is not about obscenity …or even about sex. It is about revolution and change… . Helms represents… . white patriarchal power… .[and he] knows that my writing is aimed at his destruction, and the destruction of every single thing he stands for.” Fighting a battle with cancer that she documented in her highly acclaimed Cancer Journals, Lorde died of the illness in 1992.

[bio available from: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/audre-lorde]

Sandra Cisneros 1954 - Sandra Cisneros was born the third child...

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 20:36:45 -0400

Sandra Cisneros

1954 -

Sandra Cisneros was born the third child and only daughter in a family of seven children. She has remarked that growing up, it felt as though she had “seven fathers.” Growing up Mexican and Feminist, she has said, was “almost a contradiction in terms” and that her culture told her if she stepped out of line, she was becoming “anglicized” and “influenced and contaminated by these foreign influences and ideas.” She felt that she was “always straddling two countries…but not belonging to either culture,” which she deals with in much of her writing. Cisneros attended Loyola University of Chicago for her Bachelors degree in English, and then at the University of Iowa where she received a Masters degree in Creative Writing. She has worked as a teacher and counselor to high-school dropouts, an artist-in-the schools where she taught creative writing at every level except first grade and pre-school, a college recruiter, an arts administrator, and as a visiting writer at a number of universities. In 2003, she published a collection of works called Vintage Cisneros. Her books have been translated into over a dozen languages, and she is the president and founder of the Macondo Foundation, an association of writers working for creativity and community.

Cisneros won the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award in 1985 for The House on Mango Street. Caramelo was chosen as a notable book of the year by several journals (including the LA Times, the NY Times, the Seattle Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the San Francisco Tribunal), and was nominated for the Orange Prize in England. Loose Woman won the Mountains & Plains Booksellers’ Award. Woman Hollering Creek won the PEN Center West Award for Best Fiction of 1991, the Quality Paperback Book Club New Voices Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Lannan Foundation Literary Award, and was selected as a noteworthy book of the year by The New York Times and The American Library Journal, and nominated Best Book of Fiction for 1991 by The Los Angeles Times. She has received many other honors and awards from Universities all over the country.

Themes: Race, Family, Feminism, Femininity and Female Sexuality, Poverty, Place, Border Crossing

Fiction

The House on Mango Street
Caramelo

Poetry

Bad Boys
My Wicked Wicked Ways
Loose Woman

Children’s Books

Hairs/Pelitos

Short Stories

Woman Hollering Creek

Mary Astell 1666-1731 Author and Social Reformer, she is known...

Sat, 10 Apr 2010 01:39:00 -0400

Mary Astell

1666-1731

Author and Social Reformer, she is known as “the first English feminist”. Astell was born and raised in Newcastle, but after the death of her mother and aunt in 1688 Mary moved to London. Her location in Chelsea meant that Astell was fortunate enough to become acquainted with a circle of literary and influential women (including Lady Mary Chudleigh, Elizabeth Thomas, Judith Drake, Elizabeth Elstob, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu), who assisted in the development and publication of her work. She was also in contact with the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft, who was known for his charitable works; Sancroft assisted Astell financially and furthermore introduced her to her future publisher. Her most famous work, ”A Serious Proposal to the Ladies”, suggested a scheme for the education and improvement of the female sex. She spent a lot of her time and energy creating and running a charity school for girls. In the early 1690s Astell entered into correspondence with John Norris of Bemerton, after reading Norris’s Practical Discourses, upon several Divine subjects. The letters illuminate Astell’s thoughts on God and theology. Norris thought the letters worthy of publication and had them published with Astell’s consent as Letters Concerning the Love of God. Her name did not appear in the book, but her identity was soon discovered and her rhetorical style was much lauded by contemporaries. Astell died a few months after a mastectomy to remove a cancerous right breast.

Themes: Education, War, Marriage, Women, Gender, Politics, Religion, God

Nonfiction

A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest
Letters Concerning the Love of God, between the author of the ‘Proposal to the Ladies’ and Mr John Norris
Some Reflections upon Marriage Occasioned by the Duke and Duchess of Mazarine’s Case
Moderation Truly Stated: A Review of a Late Pamphlet Entitul’d ‘Moderation a Vertue’ with a Prefatory Discourse to Dr D’Avenant Concerning His Late Essays on Peace and War
A Fair Way with the Dissenters and their Patrons
An Impartial Enquiry into the Causes of Rebellion and Civil War in This Kingdom
The Christian Religion as Profess’d by a Daughter of the Church of England
Bart’lemy Fair, or An Enquiry after Wit

Audre Lorde 1934-1992 Audre Lorde was born in New York City to...

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 16:20:50 -0400

Audre Lorde

1934-1992

Audre Lorde was born in New York City to Carribean immigrants. She learned to talk while she learned to read, at the age of four, and her mother taught her to write at around the same time. Lorde wrote her first poem when she was in eighth grade. Born Audrey Geraldine Lorde, she chose to drop the “y” from her name while still a child, explaining in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, that she was more interested in the artistic symmetry of the “e”-endings in the two side-by-side names “Audre Lorde” than in spelling her name the way her parents had intended. In 1954, she spent a pivotal year as a student at the National University of Mexico, a period she described as a time of affirmation and renewal: she confirmed her identity on personal and artistic levels as a lesbian and poet.

In the 1960’s Lorde was published widely in literary journals and anthologies. Her first volume of poetry, The First Cities (1968), was published by the Poet’s Press and edited by Diane di Prima, a former classmate and friend from Hunter College High School. Dudley Randall, a poet and critic, asserted in his review of the book that Lorde “does not wave a black flag, but her blackness is there, implicit, in the bone.” In 1980, together with Barbara Smith and Cherrie Moraga, she co-founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first U.S. publisher for women of colour. Lorde was State Poet of New York from 1991 to 1992.

She died in 1992 after a 14 struggle with Breast Cancer. Named after Audre Lorde and Michael Callen, the Callen-Lorde Community Health Center is a primary care center in New York City dedicated to providing medical health care to the LGBT population without regard to ability to pay. Another organization, The Audre Lorde Project is a New York-based organization for queer people of color. The organization concentrates on community organizing and radical nonviolent activism around progressive issues within New York City, especially relating to queer and transgender communities, AIDS and HIV activism, pro-immigrant activism, prison reform and organizing among youth of color.

Themes: Womanhood, Feminism, Sexuality, Race, Class, Radical Activism, Anti-War, Love, Autobiographical, Lesbian Experience

Poetry

The First Cities
Cables to rage
From a Land Where Other People Live
New York Head Shop and Museum
Coal
Between Our Selves
The Black Unicorn
Our Dead Behind Us
The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance

Nonfiction

Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
The Cancer Journals
A Burst of Light

Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz 1978 - Cristin O’Keefe...

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 19:46:00 -0400

Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz

1978 -

Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz was born to two government workers, the third, and only non-scientist, of her brood. She attended Central High of Philadelphia, and served as captain of the Academic Decathalon Team, and as managing editor of both the school’s literary journal, The Mirror, and its newspaper, The Centralizer. In 1996, she began her college education at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts for Dramatic Writing where classmate and slam poet Beau Sia introduced her to poetry slams. With Beau’s help, Aptowicz founded the NYC-Urbana Reading series two years later at the age of 19. She became the youngest founding slammaster in the country. She worked for a time as the editor for the Adult section for About.com, which inspired her book Hot Teen Slut, and later was a founding employee of the Bowery Poetry Club in Manhattan. She’s currently a rights agent for the Artists Rights Society, and performs and lectures across the world. In addition to being a poet, she is also a screen-writer (don’t forget, she went to Tisch for Dramatic Writing!), and has three screenplays in her portfolio.

Aptowicz has won two Slammaster Slam Championships. She is the three-time Winner of the NYU/Barnes and Noble Monologue Contest, and in 2009 won the Poet in Residence title at the Culver Academies in Culver, Indiana. Her historical non-fiction screenplay, Mütter, won the 2003 Philadelphia Film Festival Grand Prize for Screenwriting and placed in the top 10% in the both 2004 Nicholls Fellowship and 2004 Austin Film Festival Screenplay competitions.

Themes: Ex-Boyfriends, Family, Friends, Porn, Science, Like, Love, Childhood Awkwardness

Poetry

Dear Future Boyfriend
Hot Teen Slut
Working Class Represent
Oh, Terrible Youth
Everything is Everything

Screenplays

Mütter
Joob
Laurel and Matt

Non-Fiction

Words in Your Face: A Guided Tour through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam

Anaïs Nin 1903 - 1977 Anaïs Nin was born in France as Angela...

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 15:16:00 -0400

Anaïs Nin

1903 - 1977

Anaïs Nin was born in France as Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell. Nin began to pursue her interest in writing in the 1920s in Paris. Her first published work was a critical evaluation of D. H. Lawrence called D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study. Anaïs Nin is best known for her work as a diarist. Her journals, which span several decades, provide a deeply explorative insight into her personal life and relationships. Nin was acquainted, often quite intimately, with a number of prominent authors, artists, psychoanalysts, and other figures, and wrote of them often, especially Otto Rank. Moreover, as a female author describing a primarily masculine constellation of celebrities, Nin’s journals have acquired importance as a counterbalancing perspective. Her husband Guiler is, on his own wish, all but edited out of her published diaries.

In 1973 Anaïs Nin received an honorary doctorate from the Philadelphia College of Art. She was elected to the United States National Institute of Arts and Lettersin 1974.

Themes: Life, Friendship, Erotica, Love, Sex, Gender, Art, Family, Incest, Death, Surrealism,

Works

D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study
Collages
Winter of Artifice
Under a Glass Bell
House of Incest
Delta of Venus
Little Birds
Cities of the Interior (5 volumes)
The Diary of Anaïs Nin (7 volumes)
The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin (4 volumes)
The Novel of the Future
In Favor of the Sensitive Man
Henry and June
Incest: From a Journal of Love
Fire
Nearer the Moon
Aphrodesiac

Ekaterina Sedia 19??- Ekaterina Sedia was born and raised in...

Sat, 20 Mar 2010 02:16:00 -0400

Ekaterina Sedia

19??-

Ekaterina Sedia was born and raised in Moscow. She lives in New Jersey with her husband and works as a college professor of botany and plant ecology. She has 3 novels to date, and has been published widely in literary magazines and anthologies (please see her website for a complete bibliography). In addition to writing, Sedia was the editor of the World Fantasy Award-winning Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fantasy. She also edited Jigsaw Nation with Edward J. McFadden III. Alchemy of Stone received a star review from Publishers Weekly and was made the LA Times’s 2008 Summer Reading List. Her novel The House of Discarded Dreams will be published later this year.

Themes: Steampunk, Free Will, Alchemy, Class Struggle, Religion, Gender, Feminism, Politics, History, Folklore, Fantasy

Novels

According to Crow
The Secret History of Moscow
The Alchemy of Stone

Staceyann Chin 1971- A resident of New York City and a Jamaican...

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 01:49:00 -0400

Staceyann Chin

1971-

A resident of New York City and a Jamaican National, Staceyann Chin is a spoken word poet, performing artist and LGBT rights activist. Chin was the winner of the 1999 Chicago People of Color Slam; first runner- up in the 1999 Outright Poetry Slam; winner of the 1998 Lambda Poetry Slam; a finalist in the 1999 Nuyorican Grand Slam; winner of the 1998 and 2000 Slam This!; and winner of WORD: The First Slam for Television. She has also been featured by cable access programs in Brooklyn and Manhattan as well as many local radio stations. In 1999, Staceyann took the American Amazon Slam title in Aarhus, Denmark. In addition to performing in and co-writing the Tony-nominated Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, Chin has appeared in Off-Broadway one-woman shows and at the Nuyororican Poets Cafe. Her memoir was published only a month ago, but already it has garnered a lot of attention. Her collection of poetry and personal essays, Crossfire, will be released this summer.

Themes: Love, Sexuality, Jamaica, New York, God, Justice, Humor, Family, Race, Politics

Selected Works

Wildcat Woman
Stories Surrounding My Coming (chapbook available on her website)
Catalogue the Insanity (chapbook available on her website)
The Other Side of Paradise

Monique Wittig 1935-2003 Monique Wittig was a French author,...

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:18:00 -0400

Monique Wittig

1935-2003

Monique Wittig was a French author, self-professed radical lesbian, and feminist theorist. She was one of the founders of the Women’s Liberation Movement in France, Mouvement de Liberation des Femmes (MLF). She earned her Ph.D from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Wittig was involved with many radical feminist and lesbian groups in Paris in the 1970s. In her books she depicted women, exclusively. She explained this as “a mental space where sex is not determining…this is about building an idea of the neutral which could escape sexuality.” She was an advocate for the abolition of gender categories. In her advocacy of a total rupture with masculine culture, she pulled no punches, forcefully arguing, for example, that lesbians are not women because the word woman is a construction of a broken system: our sexist society. Wittig’s writing style is as unconventional as her philosophy, as she experimented with punctuation and paragraphs. She left Paris in 1976 for the United States where she taught at universities. She worked as a professor in women’s studies and French at the University of Arizona in Tucson, where she died of a heart attack. One of her last creations was a film made with Ms. Zeig, ”The Girl,” released in 2001. It received good reviews in the lesbian and gay press, and The New York Post called it ”the steamiest lesbian romp in memory.”

Themes: Childhood, Women, Feminism, Politics, Society, Lesbianism, Sexuality, Gender, Utopia, Torture, Hunting, Violence, Sex

Novels

L’Opoponax
Les Geurilleres
The Lesbian Body
Across the Acheron

Non-Fiction

The Straight Mind and Other Essays

Kelly Link 1969- Kelly Link was born in Miami, Florida. She...

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 16:43:00 -0400

Kelly Link

1969-

Kelly Link was born in Miami, Florida. She writes slipstream or magical realism, a combination of fantasy, horror, science fiction and mystery. Her short stories have won three Nebulas, a Hugo, and a World Fantasy Award. Link lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where she and her husband, Gavin J. Grant, co-edit the fantasy half of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror with Ellen Datlow, and run Small Beer Press. In 1996 they started the literary fantasy journal/zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Link has taught creative writing workshops (with a focus on short story writing) at many colleges in the New England area, including Smith College and University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Themes: Pirates, Zombies, Family, Divorce, Disappointment, Love, Friendship, Wizards, Loneliness, Gender, Politics, Hauntings, Ghosts, Magic

Short Story Collections

4 Stories: Chapbook
Stranger Things Happen
Catskin: A Swaddled Zine
Magic For Beginners
Pretty Monsters: Stories

Important Note!

Read the stories “The Faery Handbag” and “The Hortlak” (from both Magic and Pretty Monsters) on Link’s website. You can also download the majority of stories from Magic For Beginners free under a Creative Commons license.

Anne Carson 1950- Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist,...

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 03:08:02 -0400

Anne Carson

1950-

Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator and professor of Classics and comparative literature at the University of Michigan. Anne Carson burst onto the international poetry scene in 1987 when she published the long poem “Kinds of Water” in Grand Street. She was an Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany in 2007. Her writing often blends forms of poetry, essay, prose, criticism, translation, and dramatic dialogue, making her work difficult to classify. She frequently references and translates mythology in her work. She has received many awards and fellowships in recognition for her work, including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” in 2000. Carson has been notably silent about her personal life, and the biographical note in her books consists of one short sentence: “Anne Carson lives in Canada”.

Themes: Mythology, Gender, Greece, Love, God, History, Classics, Spirituality, Grief, Family

Selected Works

Eros the Bittersweet
Glass, Irony, and God
Short Talks
Plainwater
Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse
Economy of the Unlost: Reading Simonides of Ceos with Paul Celan
Men in the Off Hours (won the Griffin Poetry Prize)
Electra
The Beauty of the Husband (won the T.S. Eliot Prize)
If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho
Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera
Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripedes (translation)
An Oresteia (Translation of Agamemnon, Elektra, Orestes)

Jhumpa Lahiri 1967- Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London and raised...

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:03:00 -0500

Jhumpa Lahiri

1967-

Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London and raised in Rhode Island. She is the author of three books, and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her debut collection of stories, Interpreter of Maladies, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Hemingway Award and The New Yorker Debut of the Year. Her novel The Namesake was a New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist and was selected as one of the best books of the year by USA Today and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications. It was made into a movie by Mira Nair in 2006. She is currently a member of Arts and Humanities Committee of US government appointed by President Obama. Her most recent work, a collection of short stories titled Unaccustomed Earth, debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list. She has received a long list of awards beginning in 1993, and her work is only gaining in popularity. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her two children and husband who works as a journalist.

Themes: Food, Immigrant culture, Indian-American experience, Family, Tradition, Community, Miscarriage, Marriage

Novels

The Namesake

Short Story Collections

Interpreter of Maladies
Unaccustomed Earth

Other Works (published in The New Yorker)

Nobody’s Business
Hell-Heaven
Once in a Lifetime
Year’s End

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 1689-1762 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 15:47:00 -0500

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

1689-1762

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was an English writer and aristocrat, known for her beauty and wit in the royal court. Her father was the first Duke of Kingston and her close relative was the writer Henry Fielding. She eloped with Edward Wortley Montagu after an extended courtship that had been put to a stop by her father. From 1716 to 1718 her husband served as ambassador to Turkey, where Montagu wrote her most famous letters. Montagu distributed her work widely in her social circle, but was content not to publish (with the exception of some anonymous articles). Her letters, essays and poems were all published posthumously. She suffered a terrible case of smallpox, so severe that she was disfigured by the disease. Later she became an outspoken advocate for inoculation against the disease, something which was common practice in Turkey but not yet accepted by Western medicine. In 1739 she left her husband and went abroad. She returned to London in 1762, shortly after her husband’s death.

Themes: Marriage, Love, Prejudice, Women’s Rights, Education, Smallpox,

Non-Fiction

The Works of the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Including Her Correspondence, Poems, and Essays. In Five Volumes.
The Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. In Three Volumes.
Essays and Poems and Simplicity, a Comedy
Romance Writings
The Turkish Embassy Letters

Anne Lamott 1954- Anne Lamott is a powerful writer of both...

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:13:00 -0500

Anne Lamott

1954-

Anne Lamott is a powerful writer of both fiction and nonfiction, an activist, public speaker and teacher of writing. She was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship and has worked at UC Davis as well as writing workshops and conferences around the United States. She is lyrical, outspoken, humorous and ruthlessly honest in her work. There was a wonderful documentary made by filmmaker Freida Mock about the life and work of Lamott titled Bird by Bird with Annie. Lamott’s bi-weekly contributions to Salon.com, Word by Word, was voted Best of the Web by Time Magazine. Her latest novel, Imperfect Birds, will be released this Spring.

Themes: Loss, Christianity, Alcoholism, Motherhood, Families, Secrets, Transformation, Truth, Writing, Women

Novels

Hard Laughter
Rosie
Joe Jones
All New People
Crooked Little Heart

Non-Fiction

Operating Instructions
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Traveling Mercies
Plan B: Thoughts on Faith
Grace (Eventually): Further Thoughts on Faith

Katherine Dunn 1945- Katherine Dunn is an oddball, in that...

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:28:00 -0500

Katherine Dunn

1945-

Katherine Dunn is an oddball, in that wonderful curious way that many beloved artists are. She is brilliant and strange. Dunn has worked as a radio talk show host (for Portland’s KBOO), bartender, waitress, voice-over work & an adjunct professor at Lewis & Clark. She graduated from Reed in Oregon and traveled across Europe for years. She returned with a son. Her work covers a wide range of topics and writing styles, and she has been recognized for her outstanding work in several areas. Her novel Geek Love was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1989. That is the novel most widely available, and it has developed a cult following. She won the Dorothea Lange—Paul Taylor Award in 2004 for her work on School Hard Knocks: The Struggle for Survival in America’s Toughest Boxing Gyms. Boxing seems to be the one true constant in her career. She has been an editor and contributor for the online magazine cyberboxingzone.com for some time, and wrote a column on boxing for PDXS in the 90’s as well. She has been described as one of the best boxing writers in the United States, and her most recent work is a collection of those articles.

Themes: Portland, Boxing, Love, Family, Sex, the Circus, Runaways, Death, Insanity

Novels

Attic
Truck
3-Day Fox: A Tattoo
Geek Love

Non Fiction

The Book of Slice: Information with an Attitude
Why Do Men Have Nipples? And Other Low Life Answers to Real Life Questions
Death Scenes: A Homicide Detectives Scrapbook
Guyana
One Ring Circus: Dispatches from the World of Boxing

Marjane Satrapi 1969- Satrapi is a Iranian and French graphic...

Sun, 07 Mar 2010 01:49:00 -0500

Marjane Satrapi

1969-

Satrapi is a Iranian and French graphic novelist, illustrator, children’s book author and an Academy Award-nominated animated film director. She lived in Tehran until the age of 14, when her parents sent her to Vienna to escape the Iranian regime. Her most famous work is her autobiographical graphic novel Persepolis, which describe her childhood in Iran and her adolescence in Europe. The graphic novel won the Angouleme Coup de Coeur Award and in 2007 a film adaptation was released. This, in turn, won the Jury Prize at Cannes Film Festival and the Award for Most Valuable Movie of the Year from the Cinema for Peace. She has contributed several articles and comics to the Op-Ed section of The New York Times. Following the Iranian elections in 2009, Marjane Satrapi and Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf appeared before Green Party members of the European Parliament to present a document that suggested Mir Hossein Mousavi had actually won the election. Although not all of her work has been translated into english there has been a growing interest in her writing.

Themes: Politics, Revolution, Family, Identity, Sex, Love, Monsters, Childhood, Music, Religion

Non-Fiction (In English)

Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return
Embroideries
Chicken with Plums

Non-Fiction

Monsters Are Afraid of the Moon

Rachilde 1860-1953 Rachilde was the nom-de-plume of french...

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 16:14:00 -0500

Rachilde

1860-1953

Rachilde was the nom-de-plume of french writer Marguerite Vallette-Eymery. She was a leader in the French Decadent movement. Rachilde wrote her first novel at the age of 16, inspired by the writing of Marquise de Sade. She was not published until 1878, when she moved to Paris, adopted her nom-de-plume and applied for permission from the French authorities to dress as a man in public. She identified herself as a man of letters, and had a great distaste for the popular romance novels women in France were so famous for at the time. Her 5th book Monsieur Venus brought her a lot of attention for its erotic qualities, and was banned from neighboring Belgium as pornography. Her writing was known for its dark imagery, cynical tone and strong female protagonists. Rachilde’s weekly salons were well known, and along with her husband Alfred Vallette she started a literary journal dedicated to the Symbolist and Decadent writers. She continued writing into her 80s, producing her final work in 1947. A complete bibliography does not exist and has not yet been attempted by biographers, therefore below you will find only a list of her major works (most of which have not been translated into english to date).

Themes: Obsession, Homoeroticism, Sexual Deviance, Androgyny, Gender Roles, Sadism, Classism, Death

Novels

Monsieur Venus
Nono
La Marquise de Sade
L’animale
La Tour D’Amour
La Jongleuse
Mon Etrange Plaisir

Judy Blume 1938- It would be foolish to exclude a successful...

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:23:00 -0500

Judy Blume

1938-

It would be foolish to exclude a successful contemporary author like Judy Blume from this blog. Judy Blume is an American YA writer whose work has been translated into 31 languages. Blume published her first novel in 1969. She wrote 13 more books in the next 10 years, and suddenly she was a big star in Young Adult Literature. She also began writing adult novels, all of which ended up on the New York Times’ best-seller list. She has won more than 90 literary awards including the Library of Congress’ Living Legends award for writers and artists in 2000 for her significant contributions to America’s cultural heritage. Blume’s novels are often seen as controversial, and she is to this date the most widely banned children’s author. In 2005 her novel Forever was the second-most challenged book by library censors. Blume has been actively involved in several non-profits advocating intellectual freedom in children’s literature, including the National Coalition Against Censorship.

Themes: Racism, Menstruation, Teen Sex, Bullying, Masturbation, Religion, Teen Issues

Novels

The One in the Middle Is the Green Kangaroo
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.
Then Again, Maybe I Won’t
Freckle Juice
It’s Not the End of the World
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing
Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great
Deenie
The Pain and the Great One
Blubber
Forever
Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself
Wifey
Superfudge
Tiger Eyes
Smart Women
Just as Long as We’re Together
Fudge-a-Mania
Here’s to You, Rachel Robinson
Summer Sisters
Places I Never Meant to Be
Double Fudge
Soupy Saturdays with the Pain and the Great One
Going, Going, Gone! with the Pain and the Great One

Non-Fiction

The Judy Blume Diary
Letters to Judy: What Kids Wish They Could Tell You

Leslie Marmon Silko 1948- Leslie Marmon Silko is a Native...

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:31:00 -0500

Leslie Marmon Silko

1948-

Leslie Marmon Silko is a Native American writer born in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She grew up near the Laguna Pueblo Reservation, and her experience with the tribe had a large impact on her writing. While still in school Silko penned a short story titled The Man to Send Rain Clouds. This story brought her a lot of attention, and she was awarded the National Endowment for the Humanities Discovery Grant. Her first novel, Ceremony, was published in 1977 and quickly became a critical success. In 1981 she won the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant. She quit her job teaching to work on what would be her second novel. It would take her 10 years to complete.

Themes: Native American Experience, Women’s History, Nature, Race

Novels

Ceremony
Almanac of the Dead
Gardens in the Dunes

Poetry and Short Story Collections

Love Poem and Slim Canyon
Rain
Sacred Water: Narratives and Pictures
Yellow Woman
Storyteller
Western Stories
Laguna Women: Poems