Deal With It
A Boy in a Man’s Theater
We are the 70% (or is it 17%?) VIDA has yet to embark on an official count of the number of women playwrights whose work is staged in American theatres, but every few months a new study on gender parity reveals that approximately 17% of plays produced in the United States are written by women. Although this percentage has increased from roughly 7% in the 1970s, the numbers have not changed … [Read More...]
21 Love Poems to Adrienne Rich
Tonya Foster: “Adrienne Rich’s work stands as testament to a profoundly engaged refusal to sit quietly.”
from “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children” 2. To imagine a time of silence or few words a time of chemistry and music the hollows above your buttocks traced by my hand or, hair is like flesh, you said an age of long silence relief from this tongue this slab of limestone or reinforced … [Read More...]
News and Events
Please Help Us Help Poet Diane DiPrima!
Poet Laureate of San Francisco and feminist revolutionary icon Diane Di Prima has Diane is undergoing a series of painful and difficult surgeries. She was one of the only women of the Beat Generation, and has been instrumental in shaping the way we view gender based politics. She has published over 4 dozen books of poetry, and her influence has touched us all. Please donate anything you can to … [Read More...]
The 2011 Count
VIDA Presents The 2011 Count
In 2010 VIDA took on the project: of counting the rates of publication between women and men in many of our writing world’s most prestigious literary outlets. VIDA’s Count produced hundreds of responses. It seems everyone wanted to share in a conversation that appears many believe is necessary and long overdue.
So this year we’ve done it again. We hope VIDA’s Count will go on annually until that glorious time when it is no longer needed. To see the numbers up close and personal, click here. Download The 2011 Count press release here.
The Count
The Bookstore Beat: St. Mark’s, LES NYC
AWP and SXSW have come and gone (or maybe FXFU for the antiestablishment types). The expense reports have been turned in, the hangovers have passed but the headaches remain. I am speaking of course about the ongoing underrepresentation of women writers. I first covered the blog-war between Teddy Wayne and Jennifer Weiner on my own blog back in January. Since then Wayne seems to have backed down … [Read More...]
State of the Art
Women of Being: An Anti-List of Under-Acknowledged Authors
In a culture saturated with top-ten lists of everything from books to bikes to baby names — what can we do to right the gender imbalance in publishing besides tabulate our absences? VIDA decided to start by excavating the spaces behind the lists. We asked our board members and a few other contemporary authors to share sentences about a literary woman we feel is too little mentioned. Our short … [Read More...]