VIDA Review Archives
VIDA Review Archives
Archives of the content previously published by the VIDA Review.
Reports From the Field

Report from the Field: Seeing Is Changing
[This Report from the Field is a post by KC Trommer, regarding the controversy surrounding a member of the publishing world...

Report from the Field: On Literary Sexual Abuse, Sock Puppets, and White Sage—A Story in Blog Posts
This Report from the Field is authored by Annie Finch, and originally appeared on her personal blog, AnnieFinch.com, in three...

Report from the Field: Quadrants
Late Summer, 2016 It’s been a long, cool Portland summer and goose bumps are, at this point, a familiar...

Report from the Field: The Permission to Reveal
This July 11 Report from the Field is a post by a Addie Tsai regarding their personal experiences concerning a...

Report from the Field: Zero Tolerance, An Open Letter from Jewish Writers about U.S. Immigration Policy
This Report from the Field has been authored by Richard Zimler and signed by members of the Jewish writing community,...

Report from the Field: Of Myopia, White Supremacy and the Personal Essay
In 2017, I took my first creative nonfiction workshop with a reputed author, editor, and teacher of creative writing in...

Report from the Field: The Fearful I: Confessional Modes of Address and Speaking the Self
When I crested 12 and took the first tentative steps down authorship’s overgrown path, the trees and buzzing insects spoke...

Report from the Field: Justice
This Report from the Field is a post authored by Jody Hobbs Hesler regarding her account of her personal experiences...

Report from the Field: Money, Writing, & Opportunity: A Manifesto
In creative fields where labor is undervalued, writers and artists are asked to work for “exposure” in lieu of compensation...

Report from the Field: Native Women Writers Take on the ‘Indian Du Jour’
Indian Country and, in particular, the Native writing community, is grieving today because of the scandal (known among many Native...

Report from the Field: Behind the Scenes at AWP with members of The Disabled & Deaf Uprising
This Report from the Field is a post by a collective of anonymous writers regarding the developing controversy concerning noted...

Report from the Field: Sexual Harassment in the Children’s Book Industry
This Report from the Field is a republication of Anne Ursu’s essay originally published here at Medium.com in response to the...

Report from the Field: Holding Your Now-Defunct Publisher Accountable When They Refuse To Honor Your Contract or Return Your Emails: A Memoir
This Report from the Field is the author’s account of events regarding the developing controversy regarding a member of the...

Report from the Field: Poets on Strike, Irish Women Poets and the Canon
This Report from the Field includes a republication of Fired! Irish Women Poets and the Canon’s pledge in response to...

Report from the Field: Gender Inequality Within Literary Prize Culture
Prizes aren’t everything. But for literary writers in a world growing less literary, they just might be. Ivor Indyk states...

Report from the Field: The Poet as Beginning Mother
It was October and I was thirteen. On the bright car ride home from school, my dad told me my...

Report from the Field: Home is Where the Women Are
A few months ago, I spotted a video of my mother and her sisters on Facebook. The video was taken...

Report from the Field: Embodied Writing Can Be Your New Activism
On Saturday, January 21, 2017, I discovered that my body is not made for protest marches. Since the election and...

Report from the Field: “It’s okay, it’s art, keep going.”
This Report from the Field is a republication of Kolleen Carney’s personal blog post at https://kolleencarney.com/2017/08/24/82317-pt-2/amp/ regarding the developing controversy...

Report from the Field: Just Dangerous Enough
It is the first month of school and even after fifteen years of this routine, September still feels like the...

Report from the Field: A Catalog of Exchanges: When Men (Don’t) Read My Words
You are apparently famous, though I have never heard of you. You workshop my piece at a prestigious writing workshop...

Report from the Field: Drunken Boat Is Now Anomaly
This Report from the Field is a republication of Erica Mena-Landry’s personal blog post regarding the developing controversy regarding literary...

Report from the Field: Nasty, Nastier, Nastiest
I get called some form of nasty every day. It is part of my identity as a rigorous female teacher...
![Report from the Field: On Publishing a First Book at [almost] 50 Report from the Field: On Publishing a First Book at [almost] 50](https://i0.wp.com/www.vidaweb.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/over-their-heads.jpg?resize=580%2C458&ssl=1)
Report from the Field: On Publishing a First Book at [almost] 50
In the summer of 2015, I opened the covers of a book and read aloud to a sizable audience inside...

Report from the Field: Too Big To Fuck Up
I’ve had straight cis men do fucked up things to me. I’ve been witness to straight cis men doing fucked...

Reports from the Field: Good Intentions: What Being Disabled at #AWP17 Was Like
I’m sitting at the booth for the literary magazine where I work for free but with great privilege when a...

Report from the Field: The Silence of a Siren
At 8am I have students hunched over their copies of The Aeneid with questions from the night before, clarifications rising...

Report from the Field: To Go to Sea: Making a Place in a Male Literary Landscape
The first real poet I got to know was my teacher for two weeks at the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference,...

Report from the Field: Speaking Into Silences
I was afraid to write this essay. I have never written a personal essay. I write poetry, in which content...

Report from the Field: The Publishing Process Is Archaic
I’m closing Five Quarterly. We’re a small, online lit mag that has existed by word-of-mouth and by support of our...

Report from the Field: About the (Queer) Author
A few weeks ago, a rejection email popped into my inbox. That’s not exactly unusual; dealing with a constant stream...

Report from the Field: White Stockings: A Poetic Study of Mythical Freedom Fighters
Centuries pass, yet Russia continues to weave its myths. Traditional Russian folklore is simultaneously bleak yet enchantingly surreal—full of stories...

Report from the Field: A Working-Class Academic on Loving Elena Ferrante
Last September, during a sultry late-summer lunch hour in Manhattan, I had a street encounter that very nearly moved me...

Report from the Field: Encounters with Misogynists or, the Lap Dances I Never Received
This isn’t a lesbian club, the bald-headed bouncer spat before tossing us onto the icy Montreal street. The details before...

Report from the Field: This Voice of Mine
Eleven years ago I sat at a table in a writing studio in downtown Kalamazoo, Michigan, rented by a professor...

¿Para Quién Escribes?
The mediated Western world so disorients us that a conversation addressing our own eroded cognition is itself bound to be...

Report from the Field: People Were Upset That People Were Upset
“In the past, death was often a source of suffering.” “The poem is universal because it involves a birth and...

Report from the Field: Struggling with Creative Nepotism
I’m sitting with my friend Ronna Lebo at a cafe. We’re talking about Boni Joi, a close friend of Ronna’s...

Report from the Field: My MFA Career as a Recovering Prestige Fiend
Nearly a decade ago, I made a critical career decision to divest my life from academic institutions that didn’t value...

Report from the Field: STATEMENTS AGAINST SILENCE
This March 6 Report from the Field is a post by a collective of anonymous writers and artists regarding the...

Report from the Field: Calling Out Actions Allows People to Grow
“Big girls don’t cry,” especially not aerospace engineers like myself. Despite the fact that I was in the middle of...

Report from the Field: Aswang
Recently, I turned forty. By society’s standards, I’ve failed in many ways. I am not married. I have no children....

Report from the Field: Four Moments In the Life of a Brown Female Writer
One: I’m at a competitive and well-respected writing conference in the west and have become friends with a talented black...

Report from the Field: Racial Invisibility and Erasure in the Writing Workshop
In a novel excerpt I turned into workshop, my narrator uses the word “chinky.” My narrator is a Korean American...

Report from the Field: Moving through the Webs
My ex-husband used to keep an unframed photo of me on his desk. The photo, bent against a brass lamp,...

Report from the Field: Gone from My Heart: Violence and Anger in the Poetry Workshop
It’s the first week of the poetry unit in my introductory creative writing class. “Raise your hand if you wrote...

Report from the Field: A Problem with the Workshop Model
Among my earliest memories is being laughed at by my father and brother for allegedly trying to pee standing up,...

Report from the Field: Financial Confessions of a Feminist Organizer
In July I went to a feminist icon costume party to celebrate the first birthday of Out of the Binders,...

Report from the Field: Let’s Shake the One
We’ve recently wrapped our third annual e-chapbook contest and after an intense editorial and production process, are about to launch...

Report from the Field: Letter to C
Dear C, I am thinking of quitting poetry to sing. Maybe my voice will be more welcome there than at...

Report from the Field: Language is Home.
My high school had a system in place to deal with recent immigrants. All students from abroad were moved a...

Report from the Field: The Other Section
I attempt to practice a feminism rooted essentially in intersectionality. As a woman who has had the privilege of studying...

Report from the Field: Poetry in Late Capitalism
When I first moved to San Francisco, I went to a Chinese restaurant on Kearny Street. The restaurant was very...

Report from the Field: I Stood There Ironing…
I was twenty-three and living in a tiny, severely tilted, $150-a-month Greenwich Village studio when Tillie Olsen’s Silences was published....

Report from the Field: But Do You Have to Work?
The question came at lunch with my department chair in the middle of discussions about the future of the department,...

Report From The Field: The Defensive Male Writer
There are so many very important articles on the victimization of women in society. And this is not one of...

Report from the Field: My Body Is Not Your Receptacle
It was less than a month ago that B O D Y literary journal came under fire via social...

Report from the Field: To Lift Off My Veil
When I began considering Anne Sexton, the American poet who could not bear the sexism of the mid-20th century Western...

Report from the Field: On (Not) Reporting Sexual Violence
During my first six months of graduate school I was stalked and sexually harassed by a guy in my cohort....

Report from the Field– Speak Test: The Silencing of the Racialized Body
In my third year as an MFA student, I received an email from my English department requesting that I schedule...

Report from the Field: I Don’t Know How She Does It
I can’t remember the first time I heard the phrase in reference to myself: I don’t know how she does...

Report from the Field– What We Don’t Name: The Delicate Path of Literary Crimes
When I launched The Atlas Review a bit over two years ago, I felt certain that the best way to...

Reports from the Field: On a Clear Day: Notes on Identity
I. 1. In her 1994 essay, “On Not Being A Victim,” Mary Gaitskill writes: “One reason I had sex...

Report from the Field: “Legal Residents Only:” The Undocupoets Campaign
Various Undocupoets from throughout the nation recently have been working on a petition against the unjust discrimination imposed by first...

Report from the Field: A Textbook Case of Diversity: How Educational Publishing Skims the Surface
Tokenism is a surface correction for a deeply rooted problem. We are book people in my family. Every January, we...

Report from the Field: Some Day You Will Ache Like I Ache– What Sexualized Language Means to Me
Recently my grandmother writes on Facebook under a picture of my, at the time, fourteen-year-old sister: “sexy.” A few days...

Report from the Field: Paintings I Won’t Paint
I have this idea for a series of paintings. Which is unusual for me because I don’t really paint. The...

Report From the Field: White People Love Me: Dispatches From The Token
I get along with white people really well. Growing up, they brought peppermint bark down the cul-de-sac to my parents’...

Report from the Field: On Grief
Because it’s afternoon. Because the sun is setting. Because I’m followed home at night and to work some mornings. Because...

Report from the Field: Youth Poetry Slam
Every year, a poetry slam is held at Poets House in Manhattan. Boys and girls from high schools and middle...

Report from the Field: Quid Pro Quo
What I remember is red wine sloshing in hotel coffee mugs. What I remember is trying to scoot out of...

Report from the Field: “Compassion in Po-Biz”
Everyone knows the stereotype about poets. Our vocation has one of the highest rates of suicide {only after playwrights}. We...

Report from the Field: “How to Sleep with a Professor”
I was nineteen and he was thirty-something. I was a student and he was a professor, not my professor but...

Report from the Field: “MFA Rape Culture”
A prestigious MFA program in quite possibly the most diverse, liberal city in America, at a liberal university. A cohort...

Report from the Field: “Letter to the Washington Post”
On June 10, the Washington Post published an article, “One Way to End Violence Against Women? Married Dads,” claiming that...

Report from the Field: “Double X”
I particularly respected two men in the literary field. They were both authors, good ones, but it is in their...

Report from the Field: “Naming Is the First Step”
Recently a piece has made its way around poetry circles via the relatively obscure web lit magazine, Claudius App. Written...

Report from the Field: “THESE THINGS HAPPENED”
When I first told my then-boyfriend that I had been raped more than once, he told me that many bad...

Report from the Field: “NO ONE WANTS TO READ ABOUT THEM”
When I was in my early 20s in my MFA program, I had the opportunity to have a consultation with...

Report from the Field: “MISOGYNY ALERT”
I continue to be troubled by what I witnessed at an off-site reading at AWP in Seattle, WA. At this...

Introducing: Reports from the Field
Once, when I was in my 20s, I sat at a restaurant after a poetry reading with a small group...
VIDA Review Reviews

VIDA Reviews! First Comes Marriage: My Not-So-Typical American Love Story by Huda Al-Marashi
The year I turned twenty-nine was one of the best years of my life. In the space of six months,...

VIDA Review Reviews! Mary Kovaleski Byrnes’ So Long the Sky
Home—Pennsylvania and Poland—ancestry, immigrant aunts, and travel to several European cities form the basis of Mary Kovaleski Byrnes’ book So...

VIDA Reviews! Ladies Lazarus by Piper Daniels
A Poet’s Encounter Ladies Lazarus is a work of creative nonfiction that offers the experience of poetry to me. Language...

VIDA Reviews! I Am Yours, by Reema Zaman
I Am Mine “We tend to think deaths and events are all that require grieving, but selves, choices, habits,...

VIDA Reviews! Surge by Etel Adnan
How does a poet’s work change as her perspectives shift decade after decade? A life containing a publication history as...

VIDA Reviews! New Poets of Native Nations, edited by Heid E. Erdrich
Last month, Vulture, the arts and entertainment site of New York magazine released “A Premature Attempt at the 21st Century...

Open the Gates: A Call For Inclusivity in Romance Reviewing
When it comes to the book publishing industry, there are a lot of barriers to inclusivity and diversity. Editors and...

VIDA Reviews! Inside Me an Island, by Lehua M. Taitano
“Who but a horizon so keenly feels how we are kept at each other’s distance?” asks writer and interdisciplinary artist...

VIDA Reviews! Resistance and Hope, edited by Alice Wong
After the polls closed for the 2016 presidential election, my husband and I strapped our soon-to-be-one-year-old daughter into her high...

VIDA Reviews! Not That Bad, edited by Roxane Gay
Content note: this piece discusses the trauma and minimization of sexual misconduct In the introduction of Not That Bad, Roxane...

VIDA Reviews! feeld notes: feeld, by Jos Charles
Jos Charles, there’s room in “thees wite skirtes” for thee and me, so let’s write these rites alchemically. I’m feeld-ing...

VIDA Reviews! This Will Be My Undoing, by Morgan Jerkins
It’s no accident the cover of Morgan Jerkins book has her looking up with eyes closed as though she’s imagining...

VIDA Reviews! In Search of Pure Lust & Conversation with Author Lise Weil
“A lesbian is a memoir.” – Lou Robinson “Lesbian-feminism invites us to be present, to follow the crumbs.” – Julie...

VIDA Reviews! Sharp by Michelle Dean
Women today are still fighting a fight that began in the 1970s—namely, to carve out their own space in the...

VIDA Reviews! Interview with Chelene Knight on Dear Current Occupant
Dear Current Occupant is non-linear memoir that maps Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside in the 80s and 90s. Through writing letters to...

VIDA Reviews! Monster Portraits by Sofia Samatar & Del Samatar — Inclusion as Key to Renewal
For as long as there has been storytelling, there have been monsters. In Egypt it was Anubis and Bastet. In...

VIDA Reviews! One Above One Below: Positions & Lamentations by Gala Mukomolova
“And I’m the one with no soul, one above and one below” laments Courtney Love, in her 1994, song “Violet.”...

VIDA Reviews! Women in Sound Zines
“Why is the largest audio forum on the internet called Gear Slutz? Why is this guitar pedal called Screaming Whore?...

VIDA Reviews! Glimmerglass Girl by Holly Lyn Walrath
From the opening lines, Glimmerglass Girl by Holly Lyn Walrath propelled me into an intersection between ethereal loftiness, humorous speculation,...

VIDA Reviews! A Book of Untruths by Miranda Doyle
Lie Like Them: Writing the Unbelievable Parent Who is telling the truth? I wrote this note for myself in the...

VIDA Reviews! Make Yourself Happy, by Eleni Sikelianos
A Greater Love: A review of Eleni Sikelianos’s Make Yourself Happy Make Yourself Happy is the last in a long...

VIDA Reviews! Kingdom of Women by Rosalie Morales Kearns
A cursory reading of Rosalie Morales Kearns’s glorious new novel, Kingdom of Women (Jaded Ibis Press, 2017), would position it...

VIDA Reviews! There Is a Case That I Am, by torrin a. greathouse
torrin a. greathouse’s There Is a Case That I Am (2017, Damaged Goods Press) is concerned with the mathematics of...
Featured

On Becoming Prey: A Conversation With Jeanann Verlee & Genevieve Pfeiffer
Genevieve Pfeiffer: You write about violence, and pain. One poem, in particular, “A Good Life” stayed with me so that...

‘(what) is a trauma response’: #MeToo, Fake News, and Transreal Ecopoetics
I. It’s late summer. Wet asphalt simmers in still heat, glazed neon by barlights. Trains screech to...

Where Is She? Two Contemporary Poets on Erasure, Gendered Violence, & Poetry
Sarah Clark: She May Be a Saint utilizes Sylvia Plath’s work as source material, and All the Twists of the Tongue...

When The Stars Fell On Starlee… And Me
If I were asked to make a list of the podcasts I listen to over and over again, almost all...

You Can Find Familiarity in Any Space You Go: A Conversation With Carlina Duan
Nearing the one year birthday of I Wore My Blackest Hair, I was drawn to revisiting this collection of poems....

Living in Liminality: Working with the Wounds of Trauma through Altered States & Poison Medicine
Adapted from a keynote given at the 2018 Transformative Language Arts Network Power of Words Conference +++ What is the...

Made of Warring Parts: An Interview with Linette Reeman & torrin a. greathouse
Sarah Clark: Both of your chapbooks are so viscerally about the body. Can you tell me how you conceptualize of...

VIDA Not So Feckless Roundtable
Sarah Fawn: How did this the idea for this anthology come about? What prompted your role and vision as an...

On Labor’s Value
In the twilight stillness, I watch my son while he sleeps. My partner and I share the responsibilities of feeding...

Discussing Resistance and Hope: Mini-Interviews with Cyree Jarelle Johnson & Naomi Ortiz
“I felt scared and powerless the evening of Election Day 2016. The term ‘resistance’ became popular and commonplace in the...

On Bad Behavior: An Interview with Therese Anne Fowler
On the November 25th cover of The New York Times Magazine, Nancy Pelosi poses in a crisp coral pantsuit and...

What Happens When You Switch a Character’s Gender?
Once I wrote a story about a woman who grows a baby in a pot. Thumbelina-style. The woman throws out...

Body of a Poem: Multiple Voices
Writing about identity is a pressure for me as a person of color, a queer person, and a queer person...

Poetry As Offering: To Practice In Poetry & Live In The Body-Mind
Chicago is my hometown, I grew up here as a poor brown queer awkward butch girl, and snuck into open...

Body of a Poem: You Cannot Make Home In A Lie
Presence teaches me, through all complexity—this mass and mess of body animate with breath—that gender is irreducible. i can remember...

Violences in Language
Recalling the days after Bush’s re-election, Toni Morrison wrote an article for The Nation outlining the strategies malicious forces use...

Lessons In Refusing Description
N’dee, queer, nonbinary. There is a certain level of difficulty I experience in trying to remember a time when I...

Body of a Poem: My Gender Is a Pair of Safety Scissors
The first time I knew I had a body was when my best friend Veronica looked at me and screamed....

Body of a Poem: Clown
The story of my father lives in my body as precise as clockwork. The story of my father during summer...

Taking Up Space
Taking Up Space is an excerpt from Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir It wasn’t difficult to be silent. My undergraduate...

I, Afterwards
nala-e-bebaak / نالۂ_بیباک (noun, urdu): an audacious sorrow The first signs of verbal violence emerged from a constant comparison between his own...

Literatura, Música, y (Huracán) María: Reflections from the Diaspora
“Maria’s thunder skirts flew high when she danced” —from “Siblings” in Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith “No hemos contado aún a...

Like: Intimacy in Late Stage Capitalism
Once, you found a skin tag on the part of your flesh that is not exactly a sex organ, but...

Body of a Poem: If language makes us visible
“I swear, you will wake— & mistake these walls for skin.” —from: Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong, by Ocean Vuong...

News Flash: There’s No Central Office Called #MeToo
1 I’d already had a bad day when I read Daphne Merkin’s now-infamous Op-Ed in The New York Times, “Publicly,...

Unsympathetic Me: Medea as Writer
I am an unsympathetic character. And I take myself way too seriously. I’m too earnest. To top it all off,...

Body of a Poem: From Zines to Novels, Genderqueer on the Page
I began writing as a zinester sixteen years ago, just days after I ran away from my abusive childhood home....

Body of a Poem—Passing: A Hybrid Form
Pass, v. I. To excel or surpass 1. trans. a. To exceed in excellence or worthiness; to surpass in some...

Karaoke with Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un
I bypass the self-serve cereal cart on the patio, the subterranean foam party pulsing with sweaty go-go dancers, the dorm...

Body of a Poem: Neither Here nor There, Asexual and Agender in the Literary World
It hurts when even my sisters look at me in the street with cold and silent eyes. I am defined...

VIDA Response to Boston Review’s Statement on Junot Díaz
June 7, 2018 VIDA Response to Boston Review’s Statement on Junot Díaz Addendum (6/8/18): This letter is to...

Nepantla’s Queer Women of Color Odes to Literary Ancestors
Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color is coming out from Nightboat Books on May 1, 2018, though...

Spam Stigma: An Open Letter to White People
Dear bougie white people of America— I am a SPAM®-Eater—and I am not ashamed. Yes, you read that right. I...

Kill Your Heroes: Examining Marianne Moore’s Fraught Racial, Misogynistic, and Capitalist Politics
Gwendolyn Brooks had already become the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry when fellow poet...

On Conclusion and Findings: A Conversation Between Yanyi and Catalina Ouyang
Catalina Ouyang‘s ongoing project Conclusion and Findings (working title) is a participatory event that takes various material forms. The artist...

Falling to Fly: Letting the Black Female Within Guide as White Supremacy Thrives
In the era before cesarean sections became the norm in my Florida Panhandle hometown, my closest kin learned an outsized,...

Dung-Aw: Conveying the Poetry of Grief
For writers with the gift of more than one language, what kinds of sounds are we able to make when...

Conformity’s Labor & Tips to Make Poetry Events More Accessible to People who are D/deaf or Hard of Hearing
When I was leading anti-bias retreats at the University of Richmond, I also founded a campus-wide book discussion series focused...

Literacy Breaking the Cage
The day my mother decided to move was not easy. I was sitting on the couch in my overalls studying...

Aut Lit By Neurotypicals; Or, Another Case Of “Where Are The Women?”
Does the trend piece make the trend? When it comes to sub-genres such as women’s literature or lesbian and gay...

An Ending
In 2014, I started my first screenplay out of anger. The Michigan Daily, my campus’ newspaper, had released a story...

The White Fists of Old Letters: On Being Plathian
I. October 5, 2017 It’s hard to say when my work was first called Plathian. It certainly could have been...

Notes on Femme and Fiction
I’m 15 and my girlfriend, my first girlfriend, is sitting before me on the floor wearing a tie. She can’t...

On Playing the Nice Woman
I am on an airplane, wearing jeans and a leatherette biker jacket. To my mind the look is Joan Jett...

Interview with Editors of Nasty Women Poets
Sarah Fawn talks to Grace Bauer and Julie Kane, editors of Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse...

To Insist on the Depth and Complexity of Our Lives
In a book I found years ago, Adrienne Rich is quoted as saying, “This is the work I see for...

Open-Wide Translation: Centering Intersectional Feminist, Accessible Translating Across Platforms
The following is an adaptation of the presentation “Open-Wide Translation: Centering Intersectional Feminist, Accessible Translating Across Platforms,” given at the...

Why I Can’t Have Coffee with You: Saying No to the Patriarchy
Faculty Meeting This summer at a faculty meeting, I joked with a colleague. I’ve learned how to do this as...

Hobbling the Leader
It’s rare when the disabled writer is invited to teach in a workshop. According to the VIDA Count, it’s rare...

Encountering Diane Wakoski: The Making of Emerald Ice
A docufantasy about the American poet Diane Wakoski It was 2014, I had just been admitted to Northwestern University for...

Happy Little Failures (On Women Who Refuse to be Humbled)
Alice Walker has this essay: “Refusing to Be Humbled By Second Place in a Contest You Did Not Design.” In...

A Dossier of Red Flags: Literary Encounters with (White, Straight, Cis) Men
I was eleven years old the first time I submitted my writing for literary consideration: a state-wide short fiction contest...

The Authored Self
Writing, for me, means freedom. Which is to say, everything prior to discovering writing was entrapment. You cannot desire freedom,...

On Writing As Liberation
I. What is the word ‘expression?’ An utterance, a declaration, a representation. Of feeling, of thought, of character. Becoming a...

Guarding the Self: Some Notes from the Commute
The importance of protecting the inner life against the stresses and assaults of ordinary life seems to be on everyone’s...

Mary Shelley Lives Again
Mary Shelley is such a well-known cultural figure, it’s easy to forget she was ever a real person. Her best-known...

Many Englishes: On Editing and Power
“Can I say this?” I would ask my American partner every time (everytime) I doubted the use of a preposition...

Body of a Poem: Genrequeer and Genderqueer in Alabama
Most of the jokes I hear about Alabama from my Northern liberal friends have nothing to do with the gorgeous,...

Meet the Charrettes
Some years ago, a poet friend who had moved away was back in Cambridge for a visit and invited a...

Body of a Poem: The Public Won’t Let Me Be Personal
Been wanting to get a haircut. Maybe clip my nails. Perhaps give away a toe or two. A hand, then...

Body of a Poem: AN ESSAY ABOUT BEING A NON MALE NON FEMALE PERSON IN THE LITERARY WORLD WRITTEN IN THE FORM OF A DREAM
You are on a beach. The beach is beautiful, with bright orange sand and an olive green ocean lapping against...

Body of a Poem: Transition as Act of Consent//Writing as Act of Consent//Ghosts as Act of Consent
I. When I began thinking about hormonal transition—long after I had articulated a gender of in-betweenness to myself—it was in...

Body of a Poem: A Collection of Unfinished Statements
I felt sexy for the first time in a long time when I first wore a binder, like my body...

The Sword
Vera Black walks the line as she empties her email, but in a death march kind of way. She finds...

Body of a Poem: La Loca
I remember it like it was today because it was yesterday, maybe this week, this month, or I’m not sure....

Body of a Poem: editorial discretion
What it doesn’t feel like: A constant, inherent, unerring wrongness—marrow-deep and strangling like mis-delivered chromosomes tied around my neck. A...

Survived or Remained Alive?: An Imagined Interview with Babushka Vera
Julia: Is it alright that I’m writing about you? Vera: Well, I suppose so. I just do not understand why...

Failing at Subjects: The Poetics of the Living Idea
I am not not an academic; and I am not not a failure. These double negatives vibrate for me, which...

The Dictator in My Notebook: On Censorship and the Risks of Writing
My mother used to warn me, “Never write anything down you wouldn’t want someone else to read. Not in a...

Compassionate Curating: On the (Literal) Cost of a Seat at the Table
Let’s begin with the obvious, the unspoken: making books costs money. More to the point, making books costs someone’s money....

Spotlight On! Black Napkin Press
Black Napkin Press is “committed to disrupting the heteronormative white-cis-male-centric publishing industry by publishing and promoting the work of...

Where We Go From Here: The Moon Does Not Fight
Tonight, the moon comes the closest to the earth that it’s been in almost 70 years. Like a silver ghost...

Where We Go From Here: Dear Students & Dear Trump
Dear Students, Good morning, class. Welcome to a new year, a new semester, and to my Race, Nation, and Borders...

Intersectionality and Activism in the Literary Landscape Podcast and Panelist Discussion
On Monday, June 6, 2016 VIDA presented Intersectionality and Activism in the Literary Landscape at Housing Works. The conversation featured...

Compassionate Curating: Your Experience Is Valid
To put it simply, being an editor is difficult—and especially so when you are dealing with work that is crucial,...

Where We Go From Here: On “Political” Poetry and Marginalization
“But one voice is not enough, nor two, although this is where dialogue begins.” — Cherrie Moraga THE PROBLEM Something occurred...

Compassionate Curating: Editing Halal If You Hear Me
Fatimah Asghar: There are as many ways of being Muslim as there are Muslims. That was the first thing that Safia...

Where We Go From Here: Writers Who Remember Freedom
You say you are my ally, stand up! Brush yourself off. There is no time for tears, for self-pitying platitudes....

Compassionate Curating: Creating Black Intentional Literary Spaces
I will always remember this past summer as one riddled with Black death. I was living in isolation at the...

Where Do We Go From Here? Against Hegemony, Toward Integrity: The Dissident Artist’s Struggle
Artists have declared their dissent from Trump. #WritersResist, #ArtAfterTrump, and #J20ArtStrike are a sample of many anti-Trump events organized by...

Writing as a Mother Worker: A Socratic Inquiry
Things we know: Lorrie Moore is a writer of humorous fiction, and many would call her prolific and successful. Lorrie...

VIDA Editor Roundtable
Sarah Fawn: Hi everyone, Sarah Fawn Montgomery here. Thank you all for (virtually) sitting down to talk about our editing...
Building Community: On the Power of Women Mentors
At 17 years old, I kept what I imagined was a riveting journal of high school life. It was rife...

Jenn Monroe in Conversation with E. Kristin Anderson!
HYSTERIA, a new anthology about writing the female body from Lucky Bastard Press (http://www.luckybastardpress.com/our-books.html), is a collection of poetry, microfiction,...

The Invisible Latina Intellectual
I am 44 years old, almost completely grey, have three degrees, including a Ph.D. in English/Latinx literature, and on a...

Notes Toward a New Language: On Women Poets and Nourishment
In 2010 I began to construct an anthology of poetry written by women who had and/or continue to struggle with...

From the Margins: Women’s Writing and Unpaid Labor
We’ve been talking about women’s unpaid labor at least since the seventies, focusing the most attention on the domestic realm....

On Lack of Self-Confidence: Women’s Presence at Art Academies in Poland
The pretext to discuss women’s self-confidence is the study Little Chance to Advance? – a report from an inquiry into the...

The Kimchi Poetry Machine Manifesta
I. The Kimchi Poetry Machine is a different kind of jar. II. Instead of kimchi, there are small paper pieces...

The Female Body at the Front of the Room
I found myself at the front of a college classroom for the first time in 2005. I’d just begun my...

HELP VIDA CONTINUE TO FIGHT FOR *ALL* WOMEN IN LITERARY ARTS!
PLEASE SUPPORT VIDA’S PRESENT & FUTURE VIDA stands for accountability, transparency and change. We work for gender parity and justice. And we...

Women Writing Books About Film
Don’t worry. You will make it through this. Stay calm. If you are reading this, you are here. You...

A. A. in Conversation with Erin Elizabeth Smith and Fox Frazier-Foley!
A. A.: What inspired you to organize Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity? Can you talk a...

Who’s Coming for You?
Sarai Walker’s novel Dietland (2015, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) has an unusual way of merging the violent with the mundane. Along...

Other Writers’ Mothers: Some Reflections on Representing Family
I wish I could get my mother to understand the poetic logic of my storytelling -Ruth Behar That wasn’t nice -Ruth Behar’s...

Fighting Against Ghosthood
“I met History once,” the St. Lucian writer Derek Walcott said in his sprawling poem “Schooner Flight,” “but he ain’t...

Amrita Pritam: Sexual Politics and Publishing in Mid-20th Century India
That was our tryst, yours and mine. We slept on a bed of stones, and our eyes, lips and finger...

La invitación del lobo
It has to be from here, forgotten but unshaken, among comrades of silence deep into Welfare Island my farewell to...

On Parsing
A few months ago, Claire Vaye Watkins’ courageous piece, On Pandering was published on the web site for the literary...

Dangerous Art: Thoughts on Danticat’s Immigrant Artist and the Creation Myth
My birth story is a war story. And for years, I thought birth and war were related. I first heard...

List of Women-Run Presses
This list exists because I went looking for this resource and couldn’t find it. Earlier this fall, I began planning...

On Fear, Fearlessness, and Intergenerational Trauma
When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we...

“I’m nothing, if not”: An Anecdote of a Jar
To discuss my own entry into writing and publishing, I must admit a contrary relationship to publication, one probably not...

The Audacity to Dream: On Asian Women, Feminism, and My Grandmother
In 1964, ahead of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, my maternal grandmother came to the United States. I...

TANGENTIAL DIVAGATION: Notes of an Immigrant Daughter
“Find a way to keep alive and write. There is nothing else to say.” — James Baldwin, “The Art of...

The Unbearable (White) Maleness of US Poetry: And How We Can Enable a Structural Response to Literary Yellowface and Gender Inequity in Publishing
On Labor Day, news broke widely that White writer Michael Derrick Hudson’s poem “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers,...

Self Censored: When Writing is Not Right
I stopped jumping in and out of trouble. Once, it was a moving car, my father pissed; the walk home...

ROUNDTABLE: POLICING THE OTHER IN THE LITERARY WORLD
This conversation, moderated by Hoa Nguyen, took place on March 29, 2015. Hoa sent out a preliminary list of questions...

Submission as Social Action
Once when I was in my early 20s, the tires on my car had gone bald, and my mother offered...

Finding Home Through Literature: A Study of Filipino Fiction
All my life, I felt ashamed because I was born in America. Growing up in Los Angeles, CA, in the...

ROUNDTABLE: POLICING THE OTHER IN THE LITERARY WORLD
This conversation, moderated by Hoa Nguyen, took place on March 29, 2015. Hoa sent out a preliminary list of questions...

Clear Media Bias on the Vote: The Oxford Professor of Poetry 2015
We can all rest easy now as poetry itself continues to rest firmly in the hands of a male poet...

Poetry, Community, and Reading the Body
Poetry can be a gateway to empathy, a space of shared vulnerability. It can help audiences navigate the difficult and...

Karen Yamashita’s Jubilant Fiascos
It’s hard to be brilliant at more than one thing. Malcolm Gladwell famously claimed that it takes ten thousand hours...

The Intensity of The Reader: Reading as a Guest / a Thief in the Classroom / in the Wreckage
The Intensity of The Reader: Reading as a Guest / a Thief in the Classroom / in the Wreckage ...

ROUNDTABLE: POLICING THE OTHER IN THE LITERARY WORLD
This conversation, moderated by Hoa Nguyen, took place on March 29, 2015. Hoa sent out a preliminary list of questions...

Rolling Stone and the Backlash Against Advocacy Journalism
It’s the tenor of the media punching show that got to me. I’m saddened that a story about sexual assault...

Language of the Border
I. Growing up young, Filipina, and undocumented in Southern California, I naturally had a monstrous appetite for the various news...

Spotlight On! Wordgathering
To spotlight this featured journal is to recognize the power within small and intentional writing workshops. It is to celebrate...

The Count in the Ivory Tower: Gender Parity in MFA Programs
A graduate PhD student and a tenured professor walk into a coffee shop—sounds like the beginning of a hackneyed joke....

VIDA @ AWP 2015 in Minneapolis!
JOIN US FOR THE VIDA AWARDS The 2015 VIDA Awards !! Thursday, April 9th at 7:30pm Skyway Theater, 711 Hennepin...

Who Does the Math? Introducing VIDA Counter Kaela Bernhardt
The people who count for VIDA count because they love literature. It would probably be an understatement to suggest they...

Who Does the Math? Introducing VIDA Counter Megan Davis
Tell us a bit about yourself. I counted from Baltimore, Maryland—my quirky home city, which, according to the bus stop...

Who Does the Math? Introducing VIDA Counter Emily Vizzo
The people who count for VIDA count because they love literature. It would probably be an understatement to suggest they...

Who Does the Math? Introducing VIDA Counter Kate Partridge
The people who count for VIDA count because they love literature. It would probably be an understatement to suggest they...

Who Does the Math? Introducing VIDA Counter Corey Campbell
The people who count for VIDA count because they love literature. It would probably be an understatement to suggest they...

Who Does the Math? Introducing VIDA Counter Chrissy Widmayer
The people who count for VIDA count because they love literature. It would probably be an understatement to suggest they...

Who Does the Math? Introducing VIDA Counter Sarah Fawn Montgomery
The people who count for VIDA count because they love literature. It would probably be an understatement to suggest they...

Who Does the Math? Introducing VIDA Counter Rachel Lake
The people who count for VIDA count because they love literature. It would probably be an understatement to suggest they...

Who Does the Math? Introducing VIDA Counter Sophia Chew
The people who count for VIDA count because they love literature. It would probably be an understatement to suggest they...

Who Does the Math? Introducing VIDA Counter Lucia LoTempio
The people who count for VIDA count because they love literature. It would probably be an understatement to suggest they...

Who Does the Math? Introducing VIDA Counter Marielle Prince
The people who count for VIDA count because they love literature. It would probably be an understatement to suggest they...

Who Does the Math? Introducing VIDA Counter Sara Iacovelli
The people who count for VIDA count because they love literature. It would probably be an understatement to suggest they...

Who Does the Math? Introducing VIDA Counter Jessica Fokken
The people who count for VIDA count because they love literature. It would probably be an understatement to suggest they...

Who Does the Math? Introducing VIDA Counter Robin McCarthy
The people who count for VIDA count because they love literature. It would probably be an understatement to suggest they...

WHY ARE PEOPLE SO INVESTED IN KENNETH GOLDSMITH? OR, IS COLONIALIST POETRY EASY?
Kenneth Goldsmith reading “The Body of Michael Brown” (screenshot via @soulellis/Twitter) “Insofar as poetry has a social function it is to...

The House With Feet: The Dire Importance of Ruth Stone’s Bequest
“Who are the women who brought my great-grandmother tea and straightened her bed? As anemone in midsummer, the air cannot...

VIDA: Fund the Count
VIDA was founded to cut through the bull. People had this intuitive sense that the literary culture was unbalanced, that...

VIDA VIP Cocktail Reception
Join us for an intimate VIP cocktail reception at AWP 2015 in support of VIDA. Honorees in attendance will include...

VIDA Roundtable on Misogynist Content and Editorial Responsibility
Recently, following the publication of a troubling poem about violence against women, a social media backlash began, along with a...

Moms on the Market
Dear Tenured Mom, I’m currently on the academic job market and pregnant. While the pregnancy itself is exciting and great...

Kundiman 10 Years Later: Reflections on Writing Faculty, Workshops, and Telling Our Collective Truths
Kundiman 10 Years Later: Reflections on Writing Faculty, Workshops, and Telling Our Collective Truths A conversation between April Naoko Heck,...

Against Our Own Best Time: Competition Among Writers in the Margins
In the small town where I grew up, I was strange and lonely. Books were my solution. The page was...

Report From the Field: White People Love Me: Dispatches From The Token
I get along with white people really well. Growing up, they brought peppermint bark down the cul-de-sac to my parents’...

Report from the Field: On Grief
Because it’s afternoon. Because the sun is setting. Because I’m followed home at night and to work some mornings. Because...

Report from the Field: Youth Poetry Slam
Every year, a poetry slam is held at Poets House in Manhattan. Boys and girls from high schools and middle...

Spotlight On! Poem-a-Day
Imagine a world slightly revised. All major consequences of the day remain the same– sleeping, waking, working, eating– but the...

Required Reading
This year, Girls Write Now is counting. A mentorship program that pairs established writers with teenage girls from underprivileged areas...

Some Questions About Empathy and Reading
First Questions: The Limits of Empathy I taught two creative writing courses as a graduate student. My undergraduates wanted answers...

Her Name Literally Meant Hero
Mavis Gallant died in February of this year, at the age of 92. She is one of my favorite writers....

SUBMITATHON! as Applied Feminist Epistemology: Rejecting Models of Scarcity, Believing in Plenty
I. When I was a Stanford sophomore I took a class called Feminist Epistemology—I know, right?—that looked at ways of...

Confessional Poetics & Intellectual Distancing: A Struggle Against Patriarchal Conventions
When I was a sophomore in college, a well known and well-awarded male poetry professor told me that because I...

Dear Fury #16: “Obviously you feel some kind of icky…”
Dear Fury, What do you do when you’re really into someone but they are not a good writer and probably...

Spotlight On! Weave Magazine
Welcome back to Spotlight On!, VIDA’s feature celebrating literary publications that publish exemplary work and include within their pages a...

Twenty ‘Gypsy’ Women You Should Be Reading
June is Roma and Traveller History Month, which began as an effort to educate people about these culturally rich, diverse,...

Resisting Tropes: On Poetry, Masochism, & Domestic Violence
PART I At dinner she asked why I write such sad poems. And I told her, “my poems are not...

The Wonderful Experience of Girls Write Now
The Mentoring Experience – from K.T. I began mentoring with Girls Write Now in September of 2013. That’s when I...

WRITING MURDER: LAST WORDS FOR XX XX
I get it, the lure of a murderer’s words. They exert an undeniable pull—this is someone talking from the outer...

The Moral Imperative
If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for? – Alice Walker Woody’s career as a...

Dear Fury #15: “Complain about them all you want… but don’t stop writing!”
Dear Fury, Poetry and I needed a time-out, a mutually-agreed break-up. Call it conscious uncoupling, if you want. Writing no...

Spotlight On! Ninth Letter
Welcome to Spotlight On!, VIDA’s new feature celebrating literary publications that publish exemplary work and include a diverse representation of...

The World Is Much Less Safe
“If you know where the light is and it goes out it frightens and pours ice through you. Like somehow...

Dear Fury #14: “Where Babies Come From”
Dear Fury, I am wondering about some pretty big things these days… As my daughter enters the world of school...

Report from the Field: “NO ONE WANTS TO READ ABOUT THEM”
When I was in my early 20s in my MFA program, I had the opportunity to have a consultation with...

Report from the Field: “MISOGYNY ALERT”
I continue to be troubled by what I witnessed at an off-site reading at AWP in Seattle, WA. At this...

Introducing: Reports from the Field
Once, when I was in my 20s, I sat at a restaurant after a poetry reading with a small group...

DEAR FURY #13: “Fury is confusing herself with her good manners!”
Dear Fury, I am a newbie writer who has tried many careers before coming back to the one Ms. James...

Women’s Citizenship in the “Republic of Letters” One-Hundred and Thirty Years Ago and Today
The 2013 VIDA count has again drawn attention to continuing gender inequities in the literary world. Over the past four...

VIDA’s CALL TO ADVENTURE
In the Hero’s Journey mythic story structure, the hero hears the “call to adventure” and then makes a choice: she...

What Is a Classic?
It’s a Pandora’s Box of a question. The buzz over writing by women gained steam in 2013, encouraged by a...

This Is Not About Your Understanding
VIDAs, I wanted to share a few thoughts on how we[1] might use 2014 to curate, incite, extend and in...

THIRTY-ONE QUESTIONS AND TWELVE APOLOGIES BY WAY OF A THANK-YOU NOTE FOR THE 2013 VIDA COUNT
I 1. What is gender and how did you know? How did you find out? 2. If you identify...

DEAR FURY #12: “What people like Professor Asshat don’t ever expect is the strength of their prey…”
Dear Fury, I am currently enrolled in a fully-funded MFA program, and am so grateful for the opportunity and privilege...

Dear Fury #11: “But what I’ve written just isn’t meant for little eyes and ears.”
Dear Fury, You know how movies have ratings like PG, PG-13 and R? Well, a lot of my writing tends...

Dear Fury #10: “What you write might hurt them… but please don’t let them take away the thing you love.”
Dear Fury, How much of a claim do I have on my own life? Memories are permanent and I cannot...
The Lives of Girls and Women: the Writing of Alice Munro
*Grateful acknowledgement is made to The Center for Fiction where this essay first appeared. A portion of this tribute is...

Editor’s Corner #16: JD Scott for Moonshot
Welcome back to Editor’s Corner, a VIDAWeb feature in which editors and publishers explore complex issues regarding sex, gender, race...

Dear Fury #9: “I write, motherfucker, you got a problem with that?”
Dear Fury, My problem is a bit embarrassing but since this is an anonymous forum, I’m going to let it...

Editor’s Corner #15: Carey Salerno for Alice James Books
Welcome back to Editor’s Corner, a VIDAWeb feature in which editors and publishers explore complex issues regarding sex, gender, race...

Locked Out of the Little House: Hollywood Shuts the Door on Women Directors. Again.
I’ve often wondered why none of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s classic children’s books have been adapted for the big screen. Based...

Editor’s Corner #14: Danielle Dutton for Dorothy
The 14th installment of Editor’s Corner is here! Editor’s Corner is a VIDAWeb feature in which editors and publishers explore complex...

Editor’s Corner #13: Kim Bridgford for Mezzo Cammin
The 13th installment of Editor’s Corner — a VIDAWeb feature in which editors and publishers explore complex issues regarding sex, gender,...

Dear Fury #8: You need to stop being so fucking delighted with yourself and learn to incorporate writing into your life.
Dear Fury, I have fallen in love in mid-life. It’s a passionate, wild ride for me right now with this...
The Cold Heart of James Salter
*Grateful acknowledgement is made to the editors of Slate where this essay was originally published in June 2013. William Faulkner, in his...

Editor’s Corner #12: Lisa Pearson for Siglio
In our 12th installment of Editor’s Corner — a VIDAWeb feature in which editors and publishers explore complex issues regarding sex,...

Dear Fury #7: We human beings trudge through the world as honorably as we can.
Dear Fury, How can a gal reconcile her personal ideologies with the professional world? I understand that this world is...

Editor’s Corner #11: Kirby Johnson, Sophie Rosenblum & Elizabeth Wade for NANO Fiction
Welcome (back!) to Editor’s Corner, a VIDAWeb feature in which editors and publishers explore complex issues regarding sex, gender, race and...

Editor’s Corner #10: Kate Angus for Augury Books
This week marks the 10th installment of Editor’s Corner. Editor’s Corner is a VIDAWeb feature in which editors and publishers explore...
Notes to My Younger Self #1: Rachel Haley Himmelheber
Introduction by Carmen Gimenez Smith My youngest sister killed herself about a year ago. At the time, I felt like...
Editor’s Corner #9: Kim Wyatt for Cherry Bomb Books
Welcome back to Editor’s Corner for our 9th installment, in which we hear from Kim Wyatt, founder of Cherry Bomb...

Dear Fury #6: “Too often writers can fall into a bad pattern of circle jerking and that’s really unproductive for everyone.”
Dear Fury, There’s a woman in my writer’s group who is constantly putting the rest of us down. She’s...
Editor’s Corner #8: Kristina Marie Darling for Noctuary Press
Welcome to our 8th edition of Editor’s Corner, a VIDAWeb feature in which editors and publishers explore complex issues regarding...

Editor’s Corner #7: Judy Berman & Niina Pollari for It’s Complicated
Welcome to the 7th installment of Editor’s Corner, a VIDAWeb feature in which editors and publishers explore complex issues regarding...

Dear Fury #5: “But I’m a writer, motherfucker! Words matter!”
Dear Fury, I know your column is for writers with writer problems, and I’m not sure my problem falls into...
Art + Access at AWP: We’re Nobody, Who Are You?: A Response to the Panel “Numbers Trouble: Editors and Writers Speak to VIDA’s Count”
Claire Lawrence: I was the middle aged woman in the third row from the back, worried that her hair and...
Women Writers and Bad Interviews
Ed. Note: This opinion piece is reprinted from Talking Writing with the permission of the author and publisher. Q: Don’t...

Editor’s Corner #6: Kate Partridge for So to Speak
Welcome to installment number 6 of Editor’s Corner. This week Kate Partridge talks to us about running a multi-genre, feminist...

Dear Fury #4: That’s just a worry about the slush turning to ice.
Dear Fury, The MFA decision date is nearing, and I’m choosing between two great programs – in many ways, a...

Editor’s Corner #5: Lori Desrosiers for Naugatuck River Review
Welcome to this week’s installment of Editor’s Corner. This week we feature Lori Desrosiers, editor of Naugatuck River Review. Desrosiers...

Dear Fury #3: It’s bullshit to think parenthood is, by definition, a career-killer.
Dear Fury, I am thirty. And I want to have a baby. But everyone tells me that I should wait...

Editor’s Corner #4: Abigail Beckel and Kathleen Rooney for Rose Metal Press
Welcome to this week’s installment of Editor’s Corner in which we hear from the editors of Rose Metal Press, Abigail...

Editor’s Corner #3: Janet Holmes for Ahsahta Press
In the third installment of Editor’s Corner, Janet Holmes from Ahsahta Press joins us. Holmes has been with Ahsahta for...

Dear Fury #2: Besides, it’s that wounded look in our partners’ eyes that reminds us we’re all despicable people at heart.
Dear Fury, I’m a writer who’s about to marry a non-writer. My female writer-friends are urging me to get a...

COUNTING: Amy King Talks with Tin House Editor Rob Spillman
Amy King: Thanks so much for being in touch with us here at VIDA. It’s heartening to hear that the...

Editor’s Corner #2: Lisa Marie Basile for Patasola Press
Welcome to Editor’s Corner, a new VIDAWeb feature, in which editors of diverse publications and literary projects weigh in regarding...

Editor’s Corner #1: Jennifer Schomburg Kanke for The Southeast Review
Welcome to Editor’s Corner, a new VIDAWeb feature, in which editors of diverse publications and literary projects weigh in regarding...

Dear Fury #1: “For a slimy little fucker like that . . .”
Dear Fury, I’ve been super hot for a guy in my poetry workshop (MFA, if you want to know). My...
Bad Girls: An Interview with Carol Moldaw and Abigail DeWitt
Carol Moldaw and Abigail DeWitt went to the same boarding school in Northern California a few years apart and then...
To Be Pure. What Would It Look and Feel Like?: An Interview with Julianna Baggott
Julianna Baggott is the bestselling and acclaimed author of 18 books. A novelist in several genres, a poet and essayist,...

The Establishment: The Old Face of the Grand Old Patriarchy
Immediately following President Obama’s reelection, news sources proclaimed ‘The Establishment GOP is Dead’. It was almost like they were a...

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...

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...

Women and Children First! Why anyone who cares about gender and literature should pick up a children’s book. Now.
The first time I heard that Judy Blume is one of the most censored/challenged American authors of all time, I...
Human Lives: A conversation between Jane Hirshfield and Leslie McGrath
Jane Hirshfield speaks with poet Leslie McGrath about what it means to be women-poets of their generation. The two met in 2004 at the Bennington Writing Seminars, when Hirshfield was McGrath’s teacher.
A History of Neglect
Pick up any book at the bookstore: more than likely it was commissioned, edited, proofed, designed by women. In fact,...
On Writing Quimera and other Fears
Author’s Note: As a female Hispanic playwright of mixed race, I’ve tried to capture the unsteady, uncomfortable relationship between female...
Biting The Hand: VIDA Women Discuss Their Selection For The Best American Series
We’ve arrived with the numbers for the Best American series, interested to see how women fare on the “Best American” front. Parity has eluded us again. Moreover, your work has appeared, at some point, in these anthologies, and now you’re playing for Team VIDA! While our goals are to point out imbalances, query and explore the implied bias, I’m wondering if you all feel a little conflicted, as though you’re biting the proverbial hand that feeds or, at least, has praised you? (more...)

Some Notes on My Sense of an Interior*
[A Paper presented on the panel: The Great Indoors: Gender, Writing and Re-envisioning Literary Merit, AWP 2011, Washington, DC] I...
By Circumstance and Design: Gender, Writing, and Interiority
“By circumstance and design, the work of many women writers is concerned with issues of interiority.” That’s the first sentence...
Introduction
The two essays VIDA features this month were occasioned by the Publisher’s Weekly (PW) list of the 10 Best Books...
Being Female
Editor’s Note You may have already read Eileen Myles’ essay “Being Female,” and so wonder why VIDA chose to reprint...
Womanly Regard: Gender and the Act of Making Nonfiction
Lately, as a new member of the VIDA Genre Advisory Committee for creative nonfiction, I’ve been wrestling with a paradox:...
Market Casualty: The Essay I Never Wanted to Write
The writing felt timid to me, overly concerned with explaining myself and my family to an audience I was told to imagine as ignorant about Iran but open-minded and eager to learn. What was never said was that this presumed audience was white and middle class. I was supposed to write for this demographic because they buy the most books.
VIDA Interview with Anne Waldman: “From the Larynx”
A feminine academe could bring the poetry calling and practice back to the source, and explore the feminine history of this literary outrider world. And it’s happening already.
Are the Masters of the Ceremony the Masters of Our Literary Tradition?
In the previous fifteen years, The Academy of American Poet’s prizes went to forty-one men and thirty-nine women. These numbers may seem reassuring, but keep in mind that they are not representative of an overall balance in individual prizes.
Writing in the Air
When I was asked to write this essay and explore what it means to be a woman who writes for the theatre in the 20th and 21st centuries, I wrestled long and hard with the subject of a) being a woman who writes and b) a woman who writes for the theatre. Are they different things? Should they be?
Freedom’s Just Another Word for Nothing Left to Lose
I do not believe that apparent authoritative literary voices of validation would ever make such a grand claim about a novel written by a woman. I say this because I believe there are many novels by women that are about the same sort of world as presented in Freedom. Sadly, the culture usually calls these books domestic or family sagas.
What We Talk About When We’re Talking About “The Count”
"I would hope that all readers, writers, and editors who agree that the disparity is, in fact, unfair, will join the discussion and help us to move toward ways to support and encourage the work of more women writers."
Amy King Talks with Christian Teresi, Conference Director of AWP
"I talk to a lot of attendees––strangers, colleagues, and friends––about which events standout and which events they think didn’t work particularly well. Ultimately, the AWP conference has very little to do with what I think anyway; what matters is what the AWP members and the conference attendees think. Though I don’t get to see much of the conference, I feel very lucky to be able to honestly say I love my job."
Full Disclosure: I Was A Teenage Poetry Bride
"I convinced myself that I was exceptional, that anyone could see my good grades were well earned, my talent apparent. I now know this kind of rationalization has another name: in this case a big, self-justifying pile of it. Because the fact is many of my classmates were rightfully disturbed by my special status."
Where We Bump and Grind It: On Resisting Redemption in Women’s Memoir
"The self-defining ways we discuss female sexuality in the lesbian-queer world might help transform how female sexuality is explored in all women's creative nonfiction, and might be of use to any woman in search of a smart, witty rethinking of erotic expression. I say this as a challenge to myself, as well as to all CNF writers and their publishers."
Arielle Greenberg on “Gynocentric Anthems,” the Gurlesque, and Creative Partnerships
"I actually think there could be another kind of anthem, a more complicated and nebulous anthem that nonetheless loses none of its riot or exuberance, and I love the idea of a gynocentric anthem: I’ve been really interesting in reading and writing such poems."
Africa is in This World – On Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Adichie herself writes about Africa, or, about Africa in America. A conflagration of geographies that she subtly and heroically describes. New subjects in the here and now.
Due Date vs. Deadline
When I was informed that my baby would arrive on February 27th of 2009, I wrote it down in my calendar.... I was in fact preoccupied with another deadline: my application for the James Merrill House residency, which was due on January 15th. So when I landed in the hospital on January 3rd because my water broke...
VIDA Reads with Writers!

VIDA Reads with Writers – Lisa D. DeNeal!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I am currently reading Whiskey & Ribbons...

VIDA Reads with Writers — Kwoya Fagin Maples!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I’m currently reading Jessmyn Ward’s novel Sing,...

VIDA Reads with Writers – Tyrese L. Coleman!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I’m taking it back to the old...

VIDA Reads with Writers — Sara Iacovelli!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? Shrill by Lindy West. It’s made me...

VIDA Reads with Writers — Emma Cosh!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I’m reading A Little Princess by Frances...

VIDA Reads with Writers — Sheila McMullin!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? Well. I tend toward poetry collections, lyric...

VIDA Reads with Writers — Elisabeth Reidy Denison!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? Stacy Schiff’s The Witches. Camille Rankine’s Incorrect...

VIDA Reads with Writers — Kelly Lynn Thomas!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I’m reading Everfair by Nisi Shawl. It’s a...

VIDA Reads with Writers — Christina Djossa!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I am currently living in Patan, Nepal,...

VIDA Reads with Writers — Jaime Lowe!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I’m finishing up Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan Novels....

VIDA Reads with Writers — Sarah Clark!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? Ching-In Chen’s recombinant. Wendy Xu’s Phrasis. I’m...

VIDA Reads with Writers — Ellie Tipton!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? WARNING: It’s ALL Poetry. I’ve been trying...

VIDA Reads with Writers — Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? Mañana Means Heaven (University of Arizona Press,...

VIDA Reads with Writers — Ashaki M. Jackson!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I just started Vievee Francis’s Forest Primeval. It has...

VIDA Reads with Writers — Shanna Compton!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I am finally reading Geek Love by...

VIDA Reads with Writers — Mary Jo Bang!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? Sadly, there are no subways in St....

VIDA Reads with Writers — Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I’m re-reading The Salt Eaters by Toni...

VIDA Reads with Writers–Sayantani Dasgupta!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I am rereading Sonali Deraniyagala’s searing memoir...

VIDA Reads with Writers – Michelle Tea!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? What I’m reading, specifically in the morning...

VIDA Reads with Writers — Sabina Vanessa Paneva!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I am currently in the midst of...

VIDA Reads with Writers — Monica Drake!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? City of Weird: 30 Otherworldly Portland Tales,...

VIDA Reads with Writers – Farnoosh Fathi!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry...

VIDA Reads with Writers — Tisa Bryant!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I’ve been carrying around and nibbling on...

VIDA Reads with Writers – Sheila Black!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I just finished M Train by Patti...

VIDA Reads with Writers – Charlie Jane Anders
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I was just on a plane to...

VIDA Reads with Writers – francine j. harris!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? Diane Seuss’ Four Legged Girl is in my car...

VIDA Reads with Writers — Maxe Crandall!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I’ve just started Jarett Kopek’s new novel I Hate the...

VIDA Reads with Writers – Monica Wendel!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I just finished Born to Run by Christopher McDougall, which is...

VIDA Reads with Writers – Tamiko Beyer!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I’ve been reading a lot of novels lately; I’m...

VIDA Reads With Writers — Iris Cushing!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? Anita Loos’ 1925 novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It’s the...

VIDA Reads with Writers: J. Mae Barizo!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? The Vegetarian, by Han Kang My Ogre Book, Shadow...

VIDA Reads with Writers: Naomi Jackson!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I’m taking a break from my beloved...

VIDA Reads with Writers – Brynn Saito!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? The beautiful anthology, Language for a New Century:...

VIDA Reads with Writers — Wendy Xu!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? Women Without Men: A Novel of Modern Iran, by...

VIDA Reads with Writers – Hannah Sanghee Park!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? Kazim Ali’s Resident Alien: On Border-crossing and the...

VIDA Reads with Writers — Carina del Valle Schorske!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? Poetry was made for the wiggle room...

VIDA Reads with Writers — Ocean Vuong!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? Christopher Soto’s Sad Girl Poems and Garth...

VIDA Read with Writers – Rachel McKibbens!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I’m currently reading Phillip B. Williams‘ fanged...

VIDA Reads with Writers – Don Mee Choi!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? Valerie Mejer Caso’s This Blue Novel (Action...

VIDA Reads with Writers – Craig Santos Perez!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I live in Hawaiʻi so the book...

VIDA Reads with Writers — Melissa Chadburn!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I’m slutting out on all sorts of...

VIDA Reads with Writers – TC Tolbert!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I’m always in the midst of several...

VIDA Reads with Writers – Stacy Szymaszek!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? Keith Haring Journals. What book popped for you...

VIDA Reads with Writers — Christopher Soto!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I just picked up “Thief in the...

VIDA Reads with Writers — Treasure Shields Redmond!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I am reading Michelle Alexander’s The New...

VIDA Reads with Writers — Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I just got an incredible trifecta of...

VIDA Reads with Writers — Amber Atiya!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I am loving The Subsequent Blues by Gary Copeland...

VIDA Reads with Writers — Kima Jones!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I am currently reading Lan Samantha Chang‘s Hunger,...

VIDA Reads with Writers — Wendy C. Ortiz!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? Butcher’s Tree by Feng Sun Chen and Maison Femme by...

VIDA Reads with Writers — Krystal Languell!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I’m making my way through Alice Notley’s...

VIDA Reads with Writers – Morgan Parker
1.) What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? Khadijah Queen’s Fearful Beloved, out now from...

VIDA Reads with Writers – Jamia Wilson
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I am usually reading a couple of...

VIDA Reads with Writers – Kazim Ali!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I’m reading WET LAND by Lucas de...

VIDA Reads with Writers – Fred Moten!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? The Girl in the Spider’s Web by David...

VIDA Reads with Writers – Jodi Picoult!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? Golden Boy by Abigail Tarttelin What book...

VIDA Reads with Writers – Bhanu Kapil!
What are you reading on the subway or in the waiting room today? I just finished the fourth book in...