For Women’s History Month, observed annually during the month of March, we asked our member magazines and presses to share with us some of the books and literary journals they recommend reading in celebration.
Anthologies
But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies
Feminist Press | 1993
Edited by Akasha (Gloria T.) Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith and originally published in 1982, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies is the first comprehensive collection of Black feminist scholarship.
Fast Fierce Women: 75 Essays of Flash Nonfiction
Woodhall Press | 2022
Edited by Gina Barreca, this collection includes flash nonfiction by Caroline Leavitt, Maureen Corrigan, Phillis Levin, Leighann Lord, Teri Rizvi, Beth Blatt, and more.
Isn’t She Great: Writers on Women-Led Comedies from 9 to 5 to Booksmart
Read Furiously | 2024
Edited by Elizabeth Teets, this anthology is “a collection of the most beloved female-centric comedies and the audiences who adore them.”
Medusa’s Daughters: Magic and Monstrosity from Women Writers of the Fin-de-Siècle
Lanternfish Press | 2020
Edited by Theodora Goss, this collection features poems and stories by women writers from the late 1800s that “embody the very essence of magic and monstrosity.”
My Hand Holding Tight My Other Hand
Nine Syllables Press | 2023
In this anthology edited by Adrie Rose, “nine contemporary poets embrace complexity and ambiguity, the uncomfortable realities of navigating intersectional womanhood, and reach for connection across experience.”
Nonwhite and Woman: 131 Micro Essays on Being in the World
Woodhall Press | 2022
Edited by Carla Crujido and Darien Hsu Gee, Nonwhite and Woman “celebrates how women of color live and thrive in the world, and how they make their lives their own.”
Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace
Lost Horse Press | 2015
This anthology brings together “voices of women poets in the workspaces they occupy: from cotton rows to corner suites, trawlers to typing pools, nursing stations to space stations, factory floors to faculty offices.”
Nonfiction
WTAW Press | 2023
In these essays, Acevedo “portrays a young memoirist’s experience of a life that is broken, beautiful, and confusing all at once.”
The Hurricane Book: A Lyric History by Claudia Acevedo-Quiñones
Rose Metal Press | 2023
In this debut memoir, Acevedo-Quiñones “pieces together the story of her family and Puerto Rico using a captivating combination of historical facts, poems, maps, overheard conversations, and flash essays.”
Cataloguing Pain by Allison Blevins
YesYes Books | 2023
In this memoir, Blevins “explores motherhood, sexuality, and queerness as it juxtaposes the author’s diagnosis of MS with her partner’s gender transition.”
Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers by Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English
Feminist Press | 2010
Originally published in 1973, this book “examines how women-led healing was delegitimized to make way for patriarchy, capitalism, and the emerging medical industry.”
Faltas: Letters to Everyone in My Hometown Who Isn’t My Rapist by Cecilia Gentili
LittlePuss Press | 2023
Winner of the ALA Stonewall Book Award, this book is “a rich and moving epistolary memoir about transgender childhood, sexual trauma, motherhood, and a young queer life in 1970s Argentina.”
Restless Books | 2023
In this debut memoir, “Gjika tells a different kind of immigrant story by writing about the ways a woman listens to her own body, intuition, and desire.”
Pitiless Bronze: A Postpatriarchal Examination of Prepatriarchal Cultures by Ruth J. Heflin
Choeofpleirn Press | 2023
This book is “a re-examination of ancient symbols and literature through gynocentric eyes, instead of the biased androcentric view.”
The Girl Who Taught Herself to Fly by Kwan Kew Lai
Vine Leaves Press | 2022
This memoir is, according to Victoria Namkung, “a thoughtful consideration of the ways women and girls survive—and even thrive—within oppressive patriarchal systems.”
Fonograf Editions | 2022
This essay collection explores “writing and labor, art and activism, attention as a transformative practice, difference and collaboration, adjuncting and the margins of the academy, whiteness and its weapons, professionalization and its discontents, the radical importance of surprise, friendship at work, the self and its public and private modes.”
Rooms: Women, Writing, Woolf by Sina Queyras
Coach House Books | 2022
This book “offers a peek into the defining spaces a young queer writer moved through as they found their way from a life of chaos to a life of the mind.”
Wandering Aengus Press | 2023
According to Felicity Jones, “The Last Year is an evocative and heart wrenching portrait of her final days living with her daughter, Indie, who’s about to leave home for university—just as the world begins to shut down in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic.”
Fiction
Santa Fe Writers Project | 2024
The stories in this debut collection “explore how humans have used, abused, and spectacularized their equine companions throughout American history.”
Pale Shadows by Dominique Fortier
Translated from the French by Rhonda Mullins
Coach House Books | 2024
This novel tells “the story of the trio of women who brought the first collection of Emily Dickinson’s poems out of the shadows.”
Midwatch by Jillian Danback-McGhan
Split/Lip Press | 2024
In this debut short fiction collection, “women service members confront a world that treats their military service as spectacle.”
Her Body Among Animals by Paola Ferrante
Book*hug Press | 2023
In this debut short fiction collection “merging horror, fairy tales, pop culture and sci-fi, women challenge the boundaries placed on their bodies.”
Hub City Press | 2023
Franks’s new novel is “about two young women contending with unplanned pregnancies in different eras.”
Hub City Press | 2023
Hill’s debut short fiction collection “delves into the lives of twelve Black women across the Appalachian South.”
All Shades of Iberibe by Kasimma
Sandorf Passage | 2021
According to Chika Unigwe, this short fiction collection “pulses with wit and wisdom.” The stories “often surprise… often blur the line between the living and the dead.”
Sarra Copia: A Locked-in Life by Nancy Ludmerer
WTAW Press | 2023
Sarra Copia: A Locked-in Life is historical fiction based on the life of the title character, who was confined in the Jewish ghetto in Venice from her birth in 1592 until her death 49 years later.
The Simple Art of Killing a Woman by Patrícia Melo
Translated from the Portuguese by Sophie Lewis
Restless Books | 2023
Melo’s novel “conjures the epidemic of femicide in Brazil, the power women can hold in the face of overwhelming male violence, the resilience of community despite state-sponsored degradation, and the potential of the jungle to save us all.”
The Case of Cem by Vera Mutafchieva
Translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel
Sandorf Passage | 2024
This novel, “presented as a series of depositions by historical figures before a court, tells a straightforward tale: Upon the death of Ottoman Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror in 1481, his eldest son Bayezid takes the throne.”
Urban Folk Tales by Y. Rodriguez
Read Furiously | 2023
Urban Folk Tales is “a work of fiction based upon the true life experiences of the people who live in the working poor and working class neighborhoods of New York City.”
Autumn House Press | 2024
This book of 16 stories is “a humane, absurd, and timely collection of narratives centering on women’s bodies and psyches.”
Dancing with Langston by Sharyn Skeeter
Green Writers Press | 2019
According to Charles Johnson, in this debut novel, Skeeter “has crafted a story that generously delivers black American history and culture, humor, a cast of vibrant, memorable characters, and a vivid portrait of one of the world’s most celebrated literary artists, Langston Hughes.”
Boomtown Girl by Shubha Sunder
Black Lawrence Press | 2023
Set in the Bangalore region of South India, Boomtown Girl “explores the ambitions, delusions, and struggles of people navigating a rapidly developing city.”
Poetry
Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali
Alice James Books | 2024
According to Leila Chatti, this debut poetry collection “pulses with life—angels, cranes, and a woman’s own fierce potential, the miraculous and terrifying possibilities she holds within her heart, womb, and mind.”
The Time War Takes by Jessi M. Atherton
Middle West Press | 2023
In this debut poetry collection, US Army veteran, registered nurse, and mental health advocate Jessi M. Atherton “explores themes of memory, resilience, and healing.”
Bone Language by Jamaica Baldwin
YesYes Books | 2023
Baldwin’s debut poetry collection “is a testament to the specific ways women survive the world and its attacks on their bodies.”
A Tide Should Be Able to Rise Despite Its Moon by Jessica Bell
Vine Leaves Press | 2024
“Inspired by the special bond between mother and child,” Bell’s poems “search for meaning in a world of misconception.”
Master Suffering by CM Burroughs
Tupelo Press | 2021
Burroughs’s poetry collection “pendulates between yield and command; the bodies of this book are supplicant yet seething—they want nothing more than to survive.”
Church Ladies by Renee Emerson
Fernwood Press | 2023
According to A. M. Juster, in this poetry collection Emerson “creates vibrant voices for religious women ranging from Saint Hildegard of Bingen to Mahalia Jackson.”
The Maybe-Bird by Jennifer Elise Foerster
The Song Cave | 2022
In this poetry collection, Foerster “uses new poetic forms and a highly conceptual framework to build these poems from myth, memory, and historical document, resurfacing Mvskoke language and story on the palimpsest of Southeastern U.S. history.”
She Who Lies Above by Beatriz Hausner
Book*hug Press | 2023
In this poetry collection, Hausner “brings Hypatia of Alexandria, the fourth century Byzantine mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher, to life.”
Sundry Abductions by Maria Dylan Himmelman
Hanging Loose Press | 2023
According to Shane McCrae, this poetry collection offers “linguistic interest; surprises that reveal truths I couldn’t have guessed; intelligence; beauty that is not easy.”
No Spare People by Erin Hoover
Black Lawrence Press | 2023
This poetry collection “documents the joys and perils of a tiny mother-daughter family navigating life on the margins.”
Song of My Softening by Omotara James
Alice James Books | 2024
Song of My Softening “studies the ever-changing relationship with oneself, while also investigating the relationship that the world and nation has with Black queerness.”
The Beloved Community by Patricia Spears Jones
Copper Canyon Press | September 26, 2023
In her fifth poetry collection, Jones “interrogates the necessity and fragility of human bonds: sensual, familial, societal.”
Passager Books | 2023
This poetry collection explores “a world filled with cows, cormorants, dogs, mola molas, crows, bullfrogs, wrens, box turtles, chickens, bears, possums, mothers, daughters, and more.”
A Domestic Lookbook by JoAnne McFarland
Grid Books | February 6, 2024
In this multimedia collection, McFarland “writes in conversation with the text of Malinda Russell’s A Domestic Cook Book, the first known cookbook published by a Black woman in the United States.”
Read Me: Selected Works by Holly Melgard
Ugly Duckling Presse | 2023
Read Me: Selected Works features “a representative selection of Holly Melgard’s formally experimental poetic works produced between 2008 and 2018.”
The Song Cave | 2023
Nicholson’s third collection “is filled with the perverse and the sacred, whether the subject is art, love, or sex, whether it’s ancient or contemporary.”
States of Arousal by Sunshine O’Donnell
Trio House Press | 2023
In O’Donnell’s poetry collection, “the reader is confronted by the brutality of the modern world while simultaneously comforted by the delicate displays of the human spirit.”
A Brief History of Burning by Cait O’Kane
Belladonna* Collaborative | 2020
O’Kane’s debut poetry collection “discloses the moral crises of addiction, debt affliction, and an ascendant police state against communities of resistance in North Philadelphia and New York City.”
Dream Apartment by Lisa Olstein
Copper Canyon Press | 2023
In this poetry collection, Olstein “builds a world of night-rabbits, bodiless shadows, and networks of wind where ode and elegy meet.”
Perugia Press | 2018
This debut poetry collection “chronicles coming of age as a woman: the violence of discovery, the evolution of sexuality, and the demanding yet necessary acts of self-preservation and resistance.”
Two Brown Dots by Danni Quintos
BOA Editions | 2022
Selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, this poetry collection “carves a space for brown girls and weird girls.”
Tupelo Press | 2023
In this poetry collection, Rajpal “writes through post-memory, that is, the memory of the generations after a great human calamity imparted to them through family and community story-telling, materials, silences, and spiritual practice.”
Good Grief, the Ground by Margaret Ray
BOA Editions | 2023
In this poetry collection, Ray “is pulling back the curtains on our societal performance of culture, guiding an exposing light to the daily performance that is life in a woman’s body.”
Gold Line Press | 2024
According to Courtney Faye Taylor, this debut chapbook is “a study of longing—how it settles in the body and breath of a mother, how it wrecks and reconciles her future.”
A Field of Foundlings by Iryna Starovoyt
Translated from the Ukrainian by Grace Mahoney
Lost Horse Press | 2017
In this collection of her selected poems, Starovoyt “investigates Ukraine’s suppressed generational memory of the 20th century and the new context of its retelling in Eastern Europe.”
When My Mother Is Most Beautiful by Rebecca Suzuki
Hanging Loose Press | 2023
According to Jane Wong, this poetry collection “is a tender love letter, a cosmology of identity, and a bouquet of elegiac questions across time and space.”
How to Live on Bread and Music by Jennifer K. Sweeney
Perugia Press | 2009
This poetry collection “takes us on a physical and spiritual trip, symbolized in recurring images of the train.”
Because I Love You I Become War by Eileen R. Tabios
Marsh Hawk Press | 2023
According to E. San Juan, Jr., this collection of poems and prose “weaves the semiotic subtleties of icon, index, and symbol into epiphanies and discoveries that are, indeed, new additions to our world as we know it so far.”
Georgia Review Books | 2022
This debut poetry collection is “an instruction book, a grimoire, a call to insurrection to wrest power back from the social structures that serve to restrict, control, and distribute it among those few privileged above the disenfranchised.”
Bunny Presse | 2023
This poetry collection features “lyric love letters to friends and musings on daily desire, nostalgia, and thirst for connection.”
Kaan and Her Sisters by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Trio House Press | 2023
This poetry collection “illuminates the work of grief and survival, the sordid legacies of official historical record and the liberatory practice of intimate narration.”
Wilder Centuries by Yael Veitz
Fifth Wheel Press | 2022
This poetry chapbook “scatters across a vast, dreamlike, and oddly familiar universe through the narrator’s journey into processing and self-reflection.”
Awaiting by Charisse Pearlina Weston
Ugly Duckling Presse | 2023
“Part autobiography, part play, part fictive dream as long poem,” Awaiting “begins by detaching phrases and motifs from two seemingly disparate plays (Lorraine Hansberry’s What Use Are Flowers? and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot).”
Lit Mags
“Al-Nar Street” by Zeinab Belail
Translated from the Arabic by Nesrin Amin
Words Without Borders | 2020
This novel excerpt begins, “Al-Nar Street is one of the longest streets that any of the city’s residents has ever set foot in. Long and winding, it starts in the east and ends in the west, as if rising and setting with the sun.”
“August, Rue Daguerre” by Lindsay Bernal
Full Bleed | 2023
Written after the Joan Mitchell painting of the same name, this poem begins, “Say you’re / walking in circles in soggy espadrilles, / your raincoat with the broken zipper insufficient / against this weather, its inconvenience.”
“An Old Film on TV at the Reunion of the Fifinellas” by Ann Darr
Passager | 2023
This poem begins, “I watch the girl, / Hair flying, / Leap onto the wing / Of an AT6. / I know who she is, / I have made that leap.”
“Brides in the Sky” by Cary Holladay
The Hudson Review | 2018
This short story begins, “In March 1854, Kate and Olivia Christopher lost their parents to illness and inherited the family farm in Augusta County, Virginia.”
“this ring i (opal)” by Crystal Odelle
manywor(l)ds | 2023
This poem begins, “a 10-year- / old / believes / a girl / fits / a fist / of rings / i spilled / mom’s jewelry / box…”
“To the Women I Watched Kiss” by Elisabeth Plumlee-Watson
Off Assignment | 2023
This essay begins, “Were you already walking around Paris together that Saturday afternoon as my train pulled into the Gare du Nord? Or were you locked away from the rain somewhere, lost in the vastness of loving each other?”
“Juking Highlights of Barry Sanders” by Mindela Ruby
Terrain.org | 2023
This essay begins, “Urological pathogens are infiltrating headlines, entertainment, and me.”
“The First Female Rabbi Was Not Who You’d Expect” by Sigal Samuel
PB Daily | 2021
This essay begins, “When I was a preteen girl, I had a secret dream of becoming a rabbi.”
“Tongue-Twisted” by Beatriz Seelaender
L’Esprit Literary Review | 2023
This essay begins, “I am at the English school, summoning the goddesses of patience, explaining Chomsky’s Generativist Grammar to a child’s parents.”
“Like This” by Linda K. Sienkiewicz
Apple Valley Review | 2021
This poem begins, “Halfway to yoga class I realize I forgot / my mat so I turn the car around / and head home for it.”
Sinister Wisdom | 2023
Issue 128 celebrates “writers and artists who trouble gender,” exploring questions like, “What perspectives do trans lives bring to the field of feminist thought and practice? What does it mean to hold a conversation about being trans? What does it mean to be a part of that conversation?”
“Enlightenment” by Natasha Trethewey
Artemis Journal | 2024
This poem begins, “In the portrait of Jefferson that hangs / at Monticello, he is rendered two-toned: / his forehead white with illumination —”
“Making Chile Rellenos for White People” by Diana Valenzuela
Another Chicago Magazine | 2020
This poem begins, “Ingredients / 10 of those long ass chile peppers. What’re they called? Hatch? Poblano? You’re not sure. Whatever. Just look for the right kind.”
“Yuri Kochiyama Told Me the Secret” by Ella Wang
ANMLY | 2023
This poem begins, “Rumors of our disunity have been greatly exaggerated. / I don’t know a single one of my girls who wouldn’t / do the work for those we love before our own.”
Yugen Quest Review | 2024
This special issue for Women’s History Month features poetry by Ambika Talwar, Baisali Chatterjee Dutt, Lily Swarn, Anita Panda, and more.
The Kenyon Review | 2023
Published in the Summer 2023 issue, this folio includes poetry by Lynne Thompson, Felicia Zamora, and Cindy Juyoung Ok; fiction by Emma Binder and Kabi Hartman; and nonfiction by Susannah Nevison and Sophie Strohmeier.
