As LeAnne Howe puts it, “The American Indian adventure stories in Choctalking on Other Realities are three parts memoir, one part tragedy, one-part absurdist fiction, and one part ‘marvelous realism.’” The stories in this book “form the heart of [Howe’s] life’s journey, so far,” chronicling the contradictions, absurdities, and sometimes tragedies in a life lived crossing cultures and borders.
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Growing up in Las Cruces, New Mexico, the lean child of working-class Chicago transplants, Judy Grahn hungered to connect with the larger world, to create a place for herself beyond the deprivations and repressions of small town, 1950s life. Refusing the imperative to silence that was her inheritance as a woman and as a lesbian, Grahn found her way to poetry, to activism, and to the intoxicating beauty and power of openly loving other women.
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Aunt Lute Books is excited to announce the publication of El Mundo Zurdo 2, a collection of diverse essays and poetry that offer scholarly and creative responses inspired by the life and work of Gloria Anzaldúa, selected from the 2010 meeting of The Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa.
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Chosen as one of the “Best Books of 1987” by Library Journal
Selected by Utne Reader as part of its “Alternative Canon” in 1998
One of Hungry Mind Review's “Best 100 Books of the 20th Century”
Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa's experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the groundbreaking essays and poems in this volume profoundly challenge how we think about identity. Borderlands/La Frontera remaps understandings of what a "border" is, seeing it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us.
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This collection of essays, poetry, and artwork brings together scholarly and creative responses inspired by the life and work of Gloria Anzaldúa. The diverse voices represented in this collection are gathered from the 2007 national conference and 2009 international conference of the Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa (SSGA). More than 30 scholars, activists, poets, and artists contributed to El Mundo Zurdo, whose release coincides with the SSGA's second annual international conference in San Antonio, Texas.
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Why would a high school teacher who loves teaching leave school—after half a career in the classroom?
Teacher at Point Blank answers this question at a time when concerns about school performance, safety, and teacher attrition are at an all-time and often anxious high. Meditating on subtle and overt forms of violence in secondary public education from an up-close and “pink collar” point of view, Jo Scott-Coe examines her own workplace as a microcosm of the national compulsory K-12 system, where teachers—now nearly 80% women—find themselves idealized and disparaged, expected to embody the dedication of parents, the coldness of data managers, and the obedience of Stepford spouses.
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Combining elements of the real and the fantastic, Beautiful and Dark (Bella y oscura) is written from the perspective of an orphaned girl taken to live with relatives in a derelict neighborhood at the edge of a city. Trying to cope with the mystery and violence of the adult world around her, she is drawn to the Lilliputian Airelei, who fascinates her with fantastic tales that mix myth and memory.
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The Woman Who Owned the Shadows starts where the rest of the world leaves Indians off: at the brink of death. Ephanie Atencio is in the midst of a breakdown from which she can barely move. She has been left by her husband and is unable to take care of her children. To heal, Ephanie must seek, however gropingly, her own future. She leaves New Mexico for San Francisco, where she begins again the process of remembering, of trying to sort out the parts of her, ultimately finding a way to herself, relying no longer on men, but on her primary connections to the spirit women of her people and to the women of her own world.
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In this collection of five short stories and a novella, set mostly in China during and after the Cultural Revolution, Geling Yan presents us with unforgettable characters who have all, in one way or another, left home. Taking as her territory the disorienting space between home and away, Yan charts the unexpected and illuminating transformation of her characters' hearts and minds as they find themselves thrust into unlikely intimacy with strangers who embody different histories and different desires. White Snake is the first English translation of this award-winning author's elegantly crafted writing.
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Young Indiana Redpaint, traded by her father for a rodeo entry fee, flees Oklahoma to be raised by her grandparents in North Carolina. A generation later, her daughter Manna, whose life is deeply marked by her mother's losses, runs from her own tragic past and catches up with her destiny—guided by a cast of unforgettable characters: Candy, a two-year old baby girl abandoned by her mother Sugar Begay; Silas Pipe, a Vietnam veteran with a glitzy past who has built an oasis in the desert; J.B., his grass-dancing nephew; and Bill Lawton, a widowed carpenter who can chisel life out of wood. Here in Gallup, New Mexico, Manna eventually finds wholeness and healing in unexpected people and places.
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Feminist movements have made a profound impact on both spiritual and political practices; as a multicultural collection of interviews with women about the complexities of personal and social empowerment, this book connects the two through the voices of activists, healers and artists, poets and politicians. The uniqueness of Visionary Voices lies in the diversity of its contributors—including Deena Metzger, Papusa Molina, Fran Peavey, Winona LaDuke and many more—and their collective dismantling of the false dichotomy between spiritual and political growth.
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This collection brings together an unprecedented range of beautifully crafted short stories by women that span a century and a half of African American literary tradition. Editor Asha Kanwar's introduction provides historical background and context for the selection of stories by authors as varied as Alice Dunbar Nelson, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Cade Bambara, and Wanda Coleman. The writers included here, both the famous and the less well-known, together represent the remarkable diversity of African American women's writing across class, culture and time.
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This is the English translation of the extraordinarily popular Mexican novel that remained on Mexico's Top Ten Best Sellers list long after its initial publication. The protagonist of the novel, Valeria, is a member of a well-to-do Jewish family in Mexico City. She is married and has two sons. Intelligent and sensitive, she realizes that the traditional conventions of her culture and subculture have made her unable to be a whole person, acting as a relatively free agent in the world. Then she falls passionately in love with a woman, and, against tremendous family pressure, finds the courage to leave her conventional life to become the writer she has wanted to be. All the elements of a true romance written with fine literary sensibility.
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After years of teaching women's studies courses and seeing the frustration, paralysis, and depression of young students who grapple with the hard realities of social activism, Leela Fernandes has written a social critique that examines contemporary feminism and social justice movements. She discusses straightforwardly the problems with social justice organizations, academia, and identity politics. She also poses a solution: that individuals—feminists and other social justice activists—create their own non-institutional spiritual base, one that will sustain them through the hard ethical choices needed in contemporary social justice activism.
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Animal stories have been handed down through the rich oral traditions of over five hundred distinct American Indian languages and cultures, offering understanding about and guidance to the natural and social worlds. The fiction and poetry gathered in this collection honor these traditions, retelling and reshaping traditional narratives by recalling their ancient wisdom and renewing their spirit in new contexts.
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Teaching at the Crossroads presents an innovative model for teaching multicultural women’s literature that places texts by women of color at the center of the curriculum for all high school and university settings English classes. Highly accessible and designed for practical use, Teaching at the Crossroads includes sample class plans and discussion questions. Combining theory and practice, Grobman presents a much-needed guide for teachers who want to introduce their students to multiple literary traditions.
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This now-classic collection of articles, personal stories, and poems by fat women about their lives and the fat-hating society in which we live. Shadow on a Tightrope also includes material previously distributed by Fat Liberation Publications.
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Singing Softly/Cantando Bajito centers around the life of Pilar as told by her granddaughter Meli. The young Pilar's liaison with the son of a monied and proud family cuts her off from her own family, leaves her socially adrift, alone, and, finally, affects her relationship with her oldest friend. It is in the act of narration, moving in soft rhythms and slowly revealed stories, that Meli reclaims her relationship with her grandmother and mother. Reaching out with her imagination, she binds together the three generations of women burdened by secrets and frees herself to come back to the Puerto Rico she has fled.
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Singing Softly/Cantando Bajito centers around the life of Pilar as told by her granddaughter Meli. The young Pilar's liaison with the son of a monied and proud family cuts her off from her own family, leaves her socially adrift, alone, and, finally, affects her relationship with her oldest friend. It is in the act of narration, moving in soft rhythms and slowly revealed stories, that Meli reclaims her relationship with her grandmother and mother. Reaching out with her imagination, she binds together the three generations of women burdened by secrets and frees herself to come back to the Puerto Rico she has fled.
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First runner-up in the 1990 Spinsters/Aunt Lute Fiction Contest
Carole Rio, an artist running from her past, is invited to a small Texas border town to paint murals in a church—but the church has burned down in a catastrophic fire. Carole becomes the catalyst for the town's release of its collective guilt, and as the community rebuilds and heals, she faces her own terrifying nightmares and confronts her sexual identity. Send My Roots Rain reveals how memory and land can form potent ties, and how unexpected change has the power to heal and transform lives.
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Winner of the 2002 American Book Award
Why was Red Shoes, the most formidable Choctaw warrior of the 18th century, assassinated by his own people? Why does his death haunt Auda Billy, an Oklahoma Choctaw woman, accused in 1991 of murdering Choctaw Chief Redford McAlester? Moving between the known details of Red Shoes' life and the riddle of McAlester's death, this novel traces the history of the Billy women whose destiny it is to solve both murders—with the help of a powerful spirit known as the Shell Shaker.
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One hundred years after San Francisco's Great Earthquake of 1906, WritersCorps gathers the powerful voices of San Francisco youth reflecting on solidity, violence, upheaval, and regeneration in their lives and in the world. The poems on these pages are a moving story, eloquent, fragile, courageous, and shattering.
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The short stories in Reclaiming Medusa bring a much-needed perspective to the Latin American literary scene. Creating spaces in which the socially prescribed "woman's place" is questioned, problematized, and often subverted, these narratives reclaim women's lost power in ways that are subtle, complex, and sometimes startling. This revised edition contains new stories by Carmen Valle and Carmen Lugo Filippi, as well as a provocative new "Translator's Note" by editor and translator Diana L. Vélez.
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Radical Acts is an innovative compilation of essays and interviews about how feminist approaches to teaching theatre challenge and engage students, teachers, and audiences alike. Contributors include theatre practitioners working in a wide variety of settings and with diverse social groups, offering inspiring accounts of how to create a more inclusive, reflexive, and liberating theatre education. Includes essays by Cherríe Moraga, Rebecca Schneider, and Joni L. Jones/Omi Osun Olomo; interviews with Deb Margolin and Kate Bornstein.
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This collection of 20 plays creatively explores the HIV/AIDS crisis, especially as women of color in the United States experience it. Positive/Negative looks at both individual and community issues, ranging from deeply personal reckonings with grief and anger to the broader institutional problems of homophobia, racism, sexism, poverty, and access to health care.
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This compilation is the first comprehensive work to focus on South Asian American and South Asian immigrant women in the U.S. It represents a pioneering effort to collect the critical essays, creative works and personal histories by and about women of South Asian descent. The diverse expressions of identity and experience found here enable us to begin to see how women of South Asian origin define their positions within their respective communities, within wider interethnic networks, and within national and international social, economic, and political frameworks which impact women's lives, both in the United States and in South Asia.
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This collection showcases three previously unpublished writers of great talent. Rabie Harris writes about an old Jamaican woman, put into a Texas homecare facility by her daughter. The novella keeps astounding pace as the protagonist reports the unfolding drama of her two roommates. Gloria Yamato, in her three stories and long poem, locates those exact moments when African Americans are forced into painful racialized consciousness. DeeAnne Davis uses the streets of Chicago as a setting for four chapters from her forthcoming novel about an unlikely liaison between a young teenage girl and a gay cabbie.
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There’s no story that the Storyteller can’t bring you home from. But in the barrio, her hot pink fluorescent Nike Airs are all that she has to barter for your soul. While the Storyteller leaps tall Teflon cactus, stops powerful locomotives with a story thread and burns up the devil incarnate, the people of the barrio stories quietly and courageously triumph over poverty and despair. Kleya Forté-Escamilla gives us worlds of real and magic possibility.
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Miko Kings is set in Indian Territory's queen city, Ada, Oklahoma, during the baseball fever of 1907, but moves back and forth from 1969 during the Vietnam War to present-day Ada. The story focuses on an Indian baseball team but brings a new understanding to the term "America's favorite pastime." For tribes in Indian Territory, baseball was an extension of a sport they'd been playing for centuries before their forced removal to Indian Territory. In this lively and humorous work of fiction informed by careful historical research, LeAnne Howe weaves original and fictive documents such as newspaper clippings, photographs, typewritten letters, and handwritten journal entries into the narrative.
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Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Debut
A bold collection of creative pieces and theoretical essays by women of color. Making Face/Making Soul includes over 70 works by poets, writers, artists, and activists such as Paula Gunn Allen, Norma Alarcón, Gloria Anzaldúa, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Barbara Christian, Chrystos, Sandra Cisneros, Michelle Cliff, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Elena Creef, Audre Lorde, María Lugones, Jewelle Gomez, Joy Harjo, bell hooks, June Jordan, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Janice Mirikitani, Pat Mora, Cherríe Moraga, Pat Parker, Chela Sandoval, Barbara Smith, Mitsuye Yamada, and Alice Walker.
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