Sunday, September 26, 2010

Women in Literary Arts

A few weeks I stumbled upon this new organization, Vida.  Their goal is basically to "explore critical and cultural perceptions of writing by women." 
I wish I had known about this organization when I was writing about women writers from the 19th century.  I suspect VIDA is more into modern women writers, but they're not the first people to notice that women's writing often gets ignored.  So hats off to the organization for bringing attention to the issues.  :) 
Stumbling on their website also means that I found a whole new list of books by women to check out.  (Because, clearly, I need more things to read.)  But these poetry books include:
Cate Marvin's World's Tallest Disaster.  I don't so much judge books by their cover as by their title.  I like this one, especially for a poetry book.  Marvin also had another book of poetry out, Fragment of the Head of a Queen, and worked on an anthology called Legitimate Dangers, both of which also look good. 
Erin Belieu's Infanta.  In my poetry, I have this thing for poems that have one word titles from non-English languages or are obscure terms.  I'm kind of curious to see if Belieu is the same way.  I'm also planning on checking out her One Above and One Below and The Extraordinary Tide.
In creative nonfiction, there's is:
My Lesbian Husband.  Great title?  Or greatest title? 
Ecotone.  When I first saw this, I thought it might be a literary magazine, but I'm thinking now it's meant to be an academic tome, focusing on feminism.  As a feminist, I'm okay with that.  
The Poker Bride: The First Chinese in the Wild West.  Women's history, sadly, almost always manages to get ignored.  It's nice that someone is trying to focus on a woman's (possibly inaccurate) story as a way of talking about women. 
And no list is ever complete without a few literary magazines.  As someone who used to be on staff, I like looking at what other people do with the format and I want to be supportive.
Hotel Amerika.  I usually like to pick a few of the issues up, even at random, if I can.  The TransGenre issue looks particular intriguing.  
Seneca Review.   An older, well-respected literary magazine.  Hard to beat that. 
Page to Page.  Not an actual literary magazine in the strictest sense, but a retrospective (which seem to be in vogue at literary magazines these days) about the Seattle Review
And in the meantime, because I make the mistake of shopping on Amazon, I also find other books that I want to read.  Including:
Emily Dickinson's The Final Harvest.  I need to read her more obscure poems and not just the ones that they always teach in schools. 
The Best American Essays of the Century.  I'm not much of a fan of Joyce Carol Oates, to tell you the truth, but I do need to do more essay reading, and why not start with what is suppose to be the best?  For good measure, I've decided to throw in a few older editions, including 2007 and 2004.  And since we're on the subject of best essays, I decided that I could probably do with some great nature and science writing (even from 2007), African American essays, American magazine articles, Non-Required Reading, history essays and short stories

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