An illustrated celebration of fifty of history's most revolutionary and talented women writers, such Louisa May Alcott, Maya Angelou, Willa Cather and Harper Lee, and how they were able to express the multifaceted female experience through their works.

Highly gifted and imaginative as a child, Victor Villaseñor coped with an untreated learning disability and the frustration of growing up Latino in an English-only American school in the 1940s.

"Maya Angelou spent much of her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas. After a traumatic event at age eight, she stopped speaking for five years. However, Maya rediscovered her voice through wonderful books, and went on to become one of the world's most beloved writers and speakers. This inspiring story of her life features a facts and photos section at the back."--Page [4] of cover.

"Knitting the Fog is a memoir of ten-year-old Claudia, a young Guatemalan girl, whose mother leaves for the United States to escape domestic abuse and pursue economic prosperity. When her mother returns three years later, she and her sisters begin a month-long journey to El Norte. Once settled in Los Angeles, California, Claudia has trouble assimilating, but when back in Guatemala, she finds that she no longer belongs there either. Hernández's debut...

"For thousands of years, women in many cultures were excluded from or limited in education. This meant that others told their stories for them. This fascinating book shines a light on women writers who broke that mold. These women wrote some of the most intriguing stories ever written, such as Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote the world's first novel, and Olympe de Gouges, whose political essays helped spark the French Revolution"--back cover.

Award-winning journalist Herb Boyd, author of Sugar Ray Robinson's biography Pound for Pound, combines impeccable research with astute literary criticism in Baldwin's Harlem. Packed with telling anecdotes, this concise volume illuminates Baldwin's diverse views and his impressions of the community that would remain a consistent presence in virtually all his writing.

"Mama Phife Represents is a hybrid-story that follows the journey of a mother's grieving heart through her first two years of public and private mourning. Told through a tapestry of narrative poems, dreams, anecdotes, journal entries, and letters, these treasured fragments of their lives show a great love between mother and son. Artist and artist, teacher and friend. Cheryl Boyce-Taylor's gift includes drawings, emails, hip-hop lyrics, and notes Malik...

"'I remeber the day I lost my spirit.' So begins the story of Gertrude Simmons, also known as Zitkala-Ša, which means Red Bird. Born in 1876 on the Yankton Sioux reservation in South Dakota, Zitkala-Ša willingly left her home at age eight to go to boarding school in Indiana. But she soon found herself caught between two worlds--white and Native American. When Zitkala-Ša graduated, she became a music teacher, composer, and performer. As an...

"Referred to as a Canadian Rachel Carson, Louise de Kiriline Lawrence lived and worked in an isolated log cabin near North Bay. After her husband was murdered by Bolsheviks, she refused her Swedish privilege and joined the Canadian Red Cross, visiting her northern Ontario patients by dogsled. When Elzire Dionne gave birth to five babies, Louise became nurse to the Dionne Quintuplets. Repulsed by the media circus, she retreated to her wilderness cabin,...

Born in Greece and abandoned as a child, Lafcadio Hearn lived the life of an exile. He travelled the world and became a famous writer but always felt like an outsider--in Dublin, London, Cincinnati, New Orleans, and French-speaking Martinique. To him, none of these places felt like home. Hearn's life in America was punctuated by a string of successes and failures. In Cincinnati he became the city's best-known crime reporter but was fired after marrying...