My Dad Is My Hero: Tributes to the Men who Gave Us Life, Love, and Driving Lessons

My Dad Is My Hero, edited by Susan Reynolds is a passionately spun collection of essays about fathers. What I most appreciate about these narratives is the diversity. Reynolds' choices cover nearly every possible definition of a dad.

Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire

Incredible. Insightful. Inspiring. These are the words I use to describe Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire, the pivotal textbook on the growing politics of Asian American women.

Poems from the Women’s Movement

It’s debatable whether collections of work by “women poets” (or, shudder, “poetesses”) are legitimate groupings. I tend to regard these types of collections with a raised eyebrow, imagining a group of women having an outdoor party, having been shut out of some stuffy jackets-required club, now herded together and pushed through the doors all at once to their dismay.

I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde

I Am Your Sister is a collection for those who want and need to be introduced to Audre Lorde’s thinking, and it is a great anthology for those who have read and been inspired by Lorde’s writing all of their lives. How is this possible?

Fist of the Spider Woman: Tales of Fear and Queer Desire

A clever play on the seminal novel Kiss of the Spider Woman by Argentine writer and political exile Manuel Puig, Amber Dawn’s anthology Fist of the Spider Woman: Tales of Fear and Queer Desire promises a transgressive alternative to traditional horror literature and its stereotypical, categorical portrayals of women and their

Labor Pains and Birth Stories: Essays on Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Becoming a Parent

There is no older and greater story than childbirth. Pregnancy. Fertility. Life. For women, who carry the impossible miracle of bringing life into the world, birth and labor reflect the diverse experiences of our lives and livelihood. Our process through medical care, partners, health, choice, and mystery are as different as the children we birth. Labor Pains and Birth Stories is a small mirror of that richness.

Red: Teenage Girls in America Write On What Fires Up Their Lives Today

My teenage years have always seemed to be something that I’ve wanted to forget: awkwardness, feeling clueless about life, not feeling comfortable in my body, navigating love and friendships, hating my family, loving my family, not knowing who my family really was, and knowing that there must be something more to life than what I was doing. Ugh, high school. Now that I’m past my teens and well on to other decades of my life, I haven’t taken the time to look back and consider all of those big Life Questions I once had.

Letters From Black America

While it would help to appreciate and admire the historical importance of preserved letters, you don’t have to be history buff or correspondence enthusiast to delight in Letters From Black America. In a time of quickly typed emails and SMS, tangible letters hold weight for many who value thoughtful, deliberate communication.

Live Through This

In the late nineties, playwright, singer-songwriter, and spoken word artist Sabrina Chapadjiev was an impassioned student playwright in college when she experienced an intensely creative period that put her on the brink of self-destruction. She had recently learned that a young, fierce playwright she had long admired, Sarah Kane, had committed suicide, and she was worried.

Invincible Summer, Volume II

Reading Nicole Georges’ collection of zines, Invincible Summer, is like opening a time capsule to not only the writer’s life, but also the community and time period in which she lived.

PJ Harvey's Rid of Me: A Story

Rid of Me is the latest addition to Continuum International’s 33 1/3 series, which takes seminal albums of the last 40 years and allows writers of various bents to write about, around, through and over the music that informs the books.

Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico

Mary Kay Vaughn, in her introduction to Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and Power in Modern Mexico, asserts that while paternalism, Catholicism, Victorian morals and patriarchy experienced a fierce health before, during and after the Mexican Revolution, the women’s movement, while slow, was undeniable and, ultimately, irreversible.

Sing a Battle Song: The Revolutionary Poetry, Statements, and Communiqués of the Weather Underground, 1970-1974

Between 2002’s documentary The Weather Underground and such novels as Russell Banks’s The Darling, the radical revolutionary group ironically returned to the public eye in recent years. Thirty years after their underground activities ended, now that all the charges have been dropped and all of the living members of the organization have joined the establishment, albeit on the fringes (Dohrn, Ayers and Jones have become a legal scholar, an educational philosopher and an environmental activist respectively), Sing a Battle Song offers a complex, bittersweet perspective on The Weather Underground’s life and revolutionary work.

Baby Remember My Name: An Anthology of New Queer Girl Writing

Upon discovering Michelle Tea had edited a new anthology of queer girl fiction, I completely lost my butch identity as I jumped up and down and squealed in excitement. Before I even glanced at the first few pages of ­Baby Remember My Name, I assumed that each short story would revolve around some lesbian in San Francisco doing too many drugs, drinking too much alcohol and pining away over the wrong girl with endless packs of cigarettes. It’s the San Fran queer girl writing that I just can’t get enough of, and I was thrilled to see what new adventures I would read about this time.