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...
Archive for category: Featured
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...
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 laughed. I was about fifteen....
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, the United Kingdom publishing industry...
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 undocumented Mexican women and the...
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 chose the train over the...
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 of a 2011 AWP conference...
Introduction
The two essays VIDA features this month were occasioned by the Publisher’s Weekly (PW) list of the 10 Best Books of 2009 and were originally...