Jessie Redmon Fauset
Also found under Novels, Black Writers
Who Was She?
Jessie Redmon Fauset was born in 1882 in New Jersey. In 1905, she became one of the very first black female graduates of Cornell University, where she had received a scholarship and became one of the first black women inducted into the university's chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. In 1912, she began writing poems, essays, and reviews for The Crisis, the official magazine of The NAACP, before becoming its literary editor in 1919. While editor, she highlighted many previously unknown voices, including Anne Spencer, and Langston Hughes, who described her as one of the people who "midwifed the so-called New Negro literature into being." In addition to her work for the magazine, Fauset wrote several novels, including There Is Confusion in 1924 and Plum Bun in 1928. She also edited The Brownies Book, a magazine written by black authors for black children.
What Did She Write About?
Middle-class African American Life, Nature, Romance
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Zitkala-Ša
Also found under Native American Writers, Short Fiction, Poetry, Nonfiction
Who Was She?
Zitkala-Ša ("Red Bird") also known by her missionary given name Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, was born on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota in 1876. When she was eight, she left the reservation with visiting Quaker missionaries to attend White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute. In writing about her experiences at the institute, she expressed both elation at learning to read and write and deep sorrow at losing part of her Native American heritage. After feeling she no longer fit in at the reservation, she graduated from the Institute and went on to teach piano and violin, improve American education and health care, advocate for Native American rights and cultural preservation, and collect, record, and translate Native American stories, which, along with her own original work, were compiled into a series of collections, including Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems, and The Sun Dance Opera and American Indian Stories.
What Did She Write About?
Native American history, culture, and legal rights; Personal experiences and reflections; Women's rights
Where Can I Find Her Work?
This photo is from K. Kendall, taken at Smith College in 1990 and accessed via Wikimedia Commons. Displayed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License. It has only been altered in size to fit this page.
Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Also found under Nonfiction, Children's Literature, Latinx Writers, Queer Writers
Who Was She?
Gloria E. Anzaldúa was born in 1942 in southern Texas. She was an influential leader in both the modern Chicana movement and queer theory. In 1977, she moved to California and worked as a writer, lecturer, and teacher of feminism, Chicano studies, and creative writing. In 1981, she edited This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color with Cherri Moraga, and went on to publish several books of her own, including Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza and a number of bilingual children's books. She worked to eliminate labels and encourage unity in the gay community and among all people.
What Did She Write About?
Borders between countries, languages, classes, genders, and within the self; Mexican legends and culture
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Patricia Polacco
Also found under Children’s Literature, Writers with Disabilities, Award-Winners
Who Is She?
Patricia Polacco was born in 1944 in Michigan into a multicultural, multigenerational storytelling family. Growing up as an undiagnosed dyslexic, Polacco struggled with language in school, leading her to believe she was 'stupid.' She soon learned, however, that she was a talented artist, and at the age of 14, she was diagnosed with dyslexia and received reading and writing support. She went on to earn her PhD in Art History and is now the author of over 100 children's books, many of which are informed by her Ukrainian, Irish, and Russian heritage and family stories, including Rechenka's Eggs and Babushka's Doll. She has made many visits to Russia, and founded a still-active art camp in Losovough. She has also won many awards and honorary degrees, including a 1995 American Book of the Year Award, and has worked for many years as an advocate for children and teachers, establishing literature and arts courses around the globe, lecturing at universities and schools, and creating a nationally-recognized anti-bullying campaign. She served as a guest author and artist-in-residence at Sandy Hook School, and, after the shooting there, gave lectures calling for an understanding of the struggles teachers faced and for more inclusive student communities, and has been commended by government officials at both the Kremlin and the White House. Additionally, she has written plays and is currently drafting material for adults.
What Does She Write About?
Ukrainian, Irish, and Russian cultures, objects, and households, often with magical elements
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Susan Glaspell
Also found under Plays, Short Fiction, Novels, Award-Winners
Who Was She?
Susan Glaspell was born in Iowa in 1876. She graduated from Drake University and worked as a reporter for the Des Moines Register. In 1900, she reported on the murder case that would inspire her most famous play, Trifles, later reproduced in short story form as ‘A Jury of Her Peers.’ In 1901, she devoted herself primarily to short story writing, often publishing in literary and pop culture magazines. She joined discussion groups related to socialism, anarchism, Freudian philosophy, and feminism, and formally declared her support of socialism and the suffrage movement in 1914. She went on to become a best-selling novelist, a co-founder of the Provincetown Players, and a Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright for her play Alison's House.
What Does She Write About?
Shifts in social and sexual relations, Unseen protagonists, Women
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Pearl Sydenstricker Buck
Also found under Novels, Short Fiction, Poetry, Children’s Literature, Nonfiction, Award-Winners
Who Was She?
Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker was born in 1892 in West Virginia to missionary parents and spent much of her childhood in Chinkiang (Zhenjiang), in Kiangsu (Jiangsu) province of China, learning both English and Chinese. In 1914, she graduated from Randolph-Macon Woman's College, and went on to live and teach at Nanking University, surviving the 'Nanking Incident' in 1927, during which many Westerners were murdered. Throughout the 1920s and 30s, she also published stories and essays in magazines such as Nation, The Chinese Recorder, Asia, and Atlantic Monthly. In 1930, her first novel, East Wind, West Wind was published, followed by The Good Earth in 1931, which became the best-selling book for two consecutive years, and won the Pulitzer Prize and the Howells Medal in 1935. In the years following, she wrote a number of other books of both fiction and nonfiction, and in 1938, she became the first American woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Throughout her life, she published more than seventy books, including works of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, children's literature, biography and autobiography, and translations of Chinese works. In 1934, she moved back to the United States and became highly active in both civil rights and women's suffrage, writing for Crisis, the NAACP's journal, and Opportunity, the Urban League's magazine. In 1942, she co-founded the East-West Association to facilitate better communication and cultural understandings between Eastern and Western nations. In 1949, she created Welcome House, the first international, inter-racial adoption agency, to combat the fact that the U.S. adoption system considered Asian and mixed-race children 'unadoptable.' In 1964, she also established the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, which sponsors funding for thousands of American children who are not eligible for adoption.
What Does She Write About?
Interracial and international cultures communities, and politics, Impoverished neighborhoods
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Rachel Crothers
Also found under Plays, Award-Winners
Who Was She?
Rachel Crothers was born in 1878 in Illinois into a family of successful women. After graduating from high school at thirteen, she completed the curriculum at the New England School of Dramatic Instruction in one term. In 1896, she moved to New York and began acting, which she was successful at for many seasons, and continued her dramatic education, becoming a teacher. Around the turn of the century, she took up writing, and wrote a number of one-acts and full-length plays that were well-received. Her playwriting Broadway debut, Three of Us, premiered at the Madison Square Theatre and was so successful that it went on to be performed in London. In 1918, her play A Little Journey was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and between 1906 and 1937, almost 30 of her plays reached Broadway, most of which she directed. Today, she is regarded as one of the most successful playwrights in early 20th-century American theatre. She has since been inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame.
What Does She Write About?
Women's stories, often with strong comic elements
Where Can I Find Her Work?
J. California Cooper
Also found under Plays, Short Fiction, Novels, Black Writers, Award-Winners
Who Was She?
Joan Cooper was born in 1931 in California. She attended technical school and multiple universities, including the University of California, Berkley. While raising her daughter, she worked a variety of different jobs, including as a secretary, manicurist, and truck driver, writing on the side. By the 1980s, she had over a dozen plays in print. Then, Alice Walker suggested that she should try writing short stories, since they were easier to make money from. Taking her advice, Cooper published A Piece of Mine, a collection of short fiction, in 1984. In total, she published two novels, six collections of stories, and seventeen plays. In 1978, she was recognized as the Black Playwright of the Year for her play Strangers, and went on to win the 1986 American Book Award for Homemade Love, the James Baldwin Writing Award, and the American Library Association's Literary Lion Award. Today, she is particularly remembered for her vernacular style of storytelling in portraying the lives of African American characters.
What Did She Write About?
Wrote in vernacular about the lives of African Americans, especially women, in the U.S.
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Sophie Treadwell
Also found under Plays, Nonfiction & Journalism
Who Was She?
Sophie Treadwell was born in 1885 in California. She was abandoned by her father when she was five years old, though she visited him in Los Angeles during the summer. While in L.A. she became interested in theatre, and in 1906, she graduated from the University of California - Berkley. In 1908, she took up a job with the San Francisco Examiner and continued to study theatre. She joined the suffrage movement in the early 1900s and moved to New York, where she was heavily involved in both theatre and journalism. During World War I, she reported from France and was the only credentialed female journalist from the U.S. She was also the only non-Mexican reporter to interview Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. Between 1922 and 1941, seven of her plays appeared on Broadway, including Machinal, her most famous work, inspired by the trial and execution of Ruth Snyder for murdering her husband. In the 1950s and 60s, she wrote many short stories and novels while living in Austria and France. In her will, Treadwell left the production rights for all of her work (almost 40 plays) to the Diocese of Tuscon to be performed for Native American children in Arizona.
What Did She Write About?
Expressionism, Women's freedom, Politics
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Alice Gerstenberg
Also found under Plays, Award-Winners
Who Was She?
Alice Erya Gerstenberg was born in 1885 in Illinois. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1907 and settled in her hometown of Chicago where she participated in theatre and particularly supported non-commercial theatre. Throughout her life, she worked as a playwright, activist, actress, and founder of several theatre organizations. She was an original member of the Chicago Little Theatre, co-founded the Chicago Junior League Theatre for Children and the Playwright's Theatre of Chicago, and was active in the Gerstenberg Experimental Theatre Workshop and the Alice Gerstenberg Theatre. She is known for her experimental feminist dramas featuring women in leading roles, including Overtones, her best-remembered work. In 1938, she won the Chicago Foundation of Literature Award for her contributions to American drama.
What Did She Write About?
Experimental feminist dramas, Children's story adaptations, Social justice issues, radio plays
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Janet Campbell Hale
Also found under Novels, Nonfiction, Native American Writers, Award-Winners
Who Is She?
Janet Campbell Hale was born in 1946 in California to a full-blooded Coeur d'Alene father and a Kootenay/Cree/Irish mother, and grew up on Coeur d'Alene and Yakima reservations, before attending high school in Washington. She was uprooted often, moving between reservations as she and her mother, who repeatedly mocked her, tried to escape Hale's abusive father, and writing became her escape. Hale graduated from the University of California - Berkley in 1974, and published her first novel, The Owl's Song, that same year, before attending two years of law school at UC Berkley. She then went on to pursue her M.A. in English at the University of California - Davis, her thesis for which would become the novel The Jailing of Cecelia Capture. She has taught at several different universities, holding titles such as Visiting Distinguished Professor and the Richard Thompson Lectureship. She has also published a book of short stories, Women on the Run, and her memoir, Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter, which won the 1994 American Book Award. The Jailing of Cecelia Capture was also nominated and runner-up for several book awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, and Hale has also won numerous grants and fellowships.
What Did She Write About?
Strong, independent women who are proud of their heritage; Native American individuals facing oppression
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Zoe Akins
Also found under Plays, Poetry, Novels, Award-Winners
Who Was She?
Zoe Akins was born in Missouri in 1886 and was encouraged to write by her father. -Her interest in the theatre led her to try acting for a season, but she ultimately returned to playwriting. The Magical City, produced in 1915, was her first play in New York, and four years later, she made her Broadway debut with the show Papa: An Amorality in Three Acts. Though the show was well-received by critics, it was not a success with audiences. That same year, however, Akins's Déclassé also appeared on Broadway, and was a smash hit. Akins then moved to New York and produced 16 plays over the next sixteen years, her most famous being The Greeks Had a Word for It in 1930. In the 1920s, Akins sold some of her plays to eager film companies for substantial sums of money, and in 1935, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her Broadway show The Old Maid. In her later years, she took up screenwriting in addition to continuing writing for Broadway. In her lifetime, she wrote more than 40 plays, 18 of which went to Broadway between 1919 and 1940, and was also a poet and novelist
What Did She Write About?
Female leads; Romance; Comedy; Drama
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Hallie Flanagan Davis
Also found under Plays, Nonfiction, Award-Winners
Who Was She?
Hallie Flanagan Davis was born in 1890 in South Dakota. She grew up staging plays with her siblings in the family living room. In 1911, she graduated from Grinnell College and, after a period of family tragedy, moved to Massachusetts and enrolled in the famous Workshop 47 production studio, where the head of the workshop, George Baker, made her director in 1923. Soon after, Flanagan was offered a teaching job at Vassar College and, while there, drew up plans for a drama program, but they were rejected, though her efforts did yield some dramatic production classes. She was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed her to travel across Europe, an experience she later wrote about in her book Shifting Scenes of the Modern European Theater. In 1948, after serving as acting Dean of Smith College and becoming the Chair of the Department of Drama, she wrote one of her most famous plays, E=mc2: A Living Newspaper About the Atomic Age. She went on to serve as director of the Federal Theatre Project under the Works Progress Administration, received an honorary degree from Williams College, was awarded a research grant from the Rockefeller Foundation (her research for which is summarized in her book Arena), and won the first National Theater Conference Citation Award in 1968.
What Did She Write About?
Dramatic Research, Travel, Politics
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Mae West
Also found under Plays, Novels
Who Was She?
Mary Jane West was born in 1893 in New York. She began acting in 1901, entering an amateur theatre competition at the Royal Theatre as 'Baby Mae, and going on to star in many plays and films of the early 1900s, including Uncle Tom's Cabin, Ten Nights in a Ballroom, Huck Finn, A La Broadway, Night After Night, and She Done Him Wrong. In 1913, she premiered her solo comedy act, advertising herself as the "Original Brinkley Girl." In 1921, West gained copyright for her one-act play, The Ruby Ring, and in 1922, she partnered with Adeline Leitzbach to write The Hussy. In the late 1920s, she wrote and performed five plays, two of which (Sex and The Pleasure Man) were raided by the police, resulting in the arrest and trial of West and her cast members on charges of immorality and indecency relating to sexual content and "female impersonation." For the latter, West bailed the entire company out of jail, and the cast was acquitted in court. West went on to star in many more productions, and also wrote several works, including her play Frisco Kate and her novel and later play, Babe Gordon, or The Constant Sinner. In 1935, she was dubbed the highest-paid woman and the second-highest-paid person in America.
What Did She Write About?
Romance & sex, Drag, Wise femme fatales, Female leads
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Zona Gale
Also found under Plays, Novels, Short Fiction, Award-Winners
Who Was She?
Zona Gale was born in Wisconsin in 1874. She attended the University of Wisconsin before working as a journalist for six years in New York and Milwaukee. Inspired in part by her hometown of Portage, Gale created the fictional town of Friendship Village in a series of widely popular short stories that premiered in 1908, and went on to set many more stories in the town. In 1920, she published her novel, Miss Lulu Bett, which she adapted for the stage in a production that won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, making Gale the first woman to win in the category. She was also an active member of the National Women's Party, supported La Follettes and progressive agendas, and did significant lobbying for the 1921 Wisconsin Equal Right Law. Both her advocacy work and her writing reflected her strong belief in women's rights and her desire to increase the opportunities available to women.
What Did She Write About?
Women's rights; Romance; Family
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Charlotte Armstrong
Also found under Novels, Short Fiction, Plays, Poetry, Award-Winners
Who Was She?
Charlotte Armstrong was born in Michigan in 1905. After graduating from Barnard College, Armstrong worked in the classified advertisements section of The New York Times, and later as a fashion reporter for Breath of the Avenue and an accounting clerk. In the span of one year, between 1928 and 1929, she had three poems published in The New Yorker. She wrote the plays The Happiest Days and Ring Around Elizabeth, both produced on Broadway in 1939 and 1941, respectively. Armstrong was also a prolific mystery, crime, and suspense novelist, with titles including Lay On, Mac Duff!, The Case of the Weird Sisters, The Innocent Flower, The Unsuspected, The Chocolate Cobweb, and Mischief, and her A Dram of Poison, published in 1956, won the Edgar Award for Best Novel. She continued to write novels into the late fifties and sixties, and also wrote three teleplays for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, in addition to several other screenwriting credits. Within her lifetime, she published approximately 36 novels, short story collections, poems, plays, and scripts, with another novel, The Protege, published after her death.
What Did She Write About?
Mystery, Crime, Suspense
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Lola Ridge
Also found under Poetry, Award-Winners
Who Was She?
Lola Ridge was born Emily Ridge in Ireland in 1873. At the turn of century, she attended Trinity College in Sydney, New South Wales, where she began writing poems, many of which were published in the Sydney Bulletin. She was a strong and spirited advocate for the working class in both her life and writing, actively participating in protests, marches, and picketing and writing radical poetry inspired by what she saw and experienced. In 1907, Ridge moved to San Francisco after a period of family hardship, rebranding herself as Lola Ridge and telling everyone she was ten years younger than she actually was. She went on to live a life of voluntary poverty, working a variety of jobs including an illustrator, factory worker, and educational organizer, and immersing herself in the environment of the working class she advocated for. Later, she worked as associate editor for the journal Others, and lectured in Chicago on the ways in which constructed gender roles impede women's development. 1922, she became the editor for Harold Loeb's Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts, and worked to uplift and encourage new, lesser known writers. In her lifetime, she wrote five books of poetry, including Dances of Fire (1935), Firehead (1930), Red Flag (1927), Sun-up, and Other Poems (1920), and The Ghetto, and Other Poems (1918), and had poems published in both popular and radical publications, including Emma Goldman's Mother Earth. She also won several awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship to travel to Mexico, two consecutive Shelley Memorial Awards, and Poetry Magazine's Guarantor's Prize, though she has been largely left out of both biographical and anthological spaces since her death.
What Did She Write About?
Working class life, Cross-racial murder and race politics, Childhood memories, Political radicalism, Imagism, Revolutionary spirit of the humanity, Russian Revolution, Jewish immigrants in NYC ghettos, Religion (The Crucifixion).
Where Can I Find Her Work?
This photo is from David Shankbone, taken at the 2008 Brooklyn Book Festival and accessed via Wikimedia Commons. Displayed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. It has only been altered in size to fit this page.
Eileen Myles
Also found under Poetry, Novels, Queer Writers, Award-Winners
Please note: Eileen Myles used they/them pronouns, which will be used throughout this biography
Who Are They?
Eileen Myles was born in 1949 in Massachusetts, and studied at the University of Massachusetts - Boston. In 1974, they moved to New York City and began writing poetry professionally, studying with the St. Mark's Poetry Project, which they served as artistic director of from 1984 to 1987. They have published twenty volumes of poetry and fiction, including Not Me (1991) and Chelsea Girls (1994), along with other works published in the 21st century and libretti for the opera Hell. They also co-edited the 1995 anthology The New F**k You/adventures in lesbian reading and have written pieces on art, culture, and writing for ArtForum, BookForum, The Believer, The Nation, Parkett, and other publications. In 2011, Myles was also a featured writer on Harriet, and has taught at New York University, Naropa University, Columbia University, and the University of California - San Diego, where they are currently professor emeritus in writing and literature. They have won multiple honors and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant, four Lambda Book Awards, the Shelley Prize from the Poetry Society of America, and a poetry award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
What Do They Write About?
The arts, culture, writing; Autobiography; Queer narratives
Where Can I Find Their Work?
Maxine Hong Kingston
Also found under Nonfiction, Novels, AAPI Writers, Award-Winners
Who Is She?
Maxine Hong Kingston was born in 1940 in California and attended the University of California - Berkley. In the early 1970s, she moved to Hawai'i, where she began writing and lived for eleven years, attempting to escape the violence of the Vietnam War. In 1976, she wrote The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, a narrative blend of nonfiction and mythology which went on to win the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1980, she wrote the nonfiction book China Men, which became a National Book Award winner, and in 1989, she released the novel Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book. She has also published several books in the early 2000s, and edited the 2006 anthology Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace, which features the collective writings of some of the more than 500 veterans who took part in a series of therapeutic writing workshops that Kingston led. Her additional honors and awards include the National Medal of Arts (awarded by former President Barack Obama), the National Endowment for the Humanities’ National Humanities Medal (awarded by former President Bill Clinton), the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Award in Literature, the National Book Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award, and the title Living Treasure of Hawaii. She is currently a professor emeritus at her Alma Mater.
What Does She Write About?
Chinese culture; Chinese American family, heritage, and gender dynamics; Immigrant family stories and dynamics; Exploration of sense of self; Mythology; Memoir; Chinese American 'hippie' protagonists
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Jovita Idar
Also found under Nonfiction & Journalism, Latinx Writers
Who Was She?
Jovita Idar was born in 1885 in Texas to parents who stressed the importance of getting a good education. She attended Methodist schools, and graduated with a teaching certificate in 1903. One of her first teaching jobs was in the town of Los Ojuelos, where she was frustrated by the poor conditions of the school and decided to become a writer. She wrote for her family's newspaper, La Cronica, which supported progressive education ideals and advocated for the rights of Tejanos, or individuals who lived in Texas before the U.S. took control. There, Idar covered civil rights issues for the Latinx community, from the lynching and abuse of Mexican Americans and the injustice of Jim Crow laws to the sexism of the Catholic Church and the inequitable dominance of Anglo-American culture in schools. She argued for and worked towards the teaching of both Mexican and American history in schools, bilingual schooling, cross-border alliances with Mexican revolutionaries against dictatorships, women's rights, more accessible and higher quality education for different genders and nationalities, and the creation of El Primer Congreso Mexicanista (The First Mexican Congress). She worked as a nurse on both sides of the Mexican-American War and helped Mexican American women cross the border to volunteer as nurses. Then, while working at the El Progreso newspaper, she wrote an editorial Idar criticizing President Wilson’s deployment of U.S. troops to Texas-Mexico border, and single-handedly defended the newspaper office from destruction by armed Texas Rangers who had orders to shut it down. Idar continued to champion social justice causes through her work and writing, co-heading La Cronica, creating the Evolución newspaper, founding a free kindergarten, and teaching life-skills classes for women. Today, she is the namesake of Jovita Idar Elementary and El Progreso Park.
What Did She Write About?
Mexican American rights and racism; Women's rights and sexism; The need for diversity in history & language in education; Higher quality education for women and Mexican Americans; Mexican American politics
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Nella Larsen
Also found under Novels, Short Fiction, Black Writers, Award-Winners
Who Was She?
Nella Marie Larsen was born in 1891 in Illinois to a Danish mother and a West Indian father. For much of her childhood, she was educated in all-white Chicago Schools until circa 1906, when she travelled to Nashville to enroll in normal school at Fisk University, a predominantly black institution. After finishing the academic year at Fisk, she travelled to Denmark, where she spent three years visiting family and sitting in on courses at the University of Copenhagen. When she moved back to the U.S. in 1912, she enrolled at the Lincoln Hospital Training School for Nurses in New York City, and worked as a nurse in Alabama and New York from 1915 to 1921. In 1922, she took up a job as a librarian at the New York Public Library, where she worked for four years before starting a career as a novelist and short story writer, publishing her first novel, Quicksand, in 1928. The book, a blend of autobiography and fiction, earned Larsen the Harmon Foundation’s second place bronze medal, and distinguished her as one of the Harlem Renaissance's key writers. Her second novel, Passing, was released in 1929, and the following year, Larsen became the first African American woman to win a Guggenheim Fellowship. Today, the United States Postal Service honors her with her own Forever Stamp in their "Voices of the Harlem Renaissance" collection.
What Does She Write About?
Psychological effect of racial marginalization and duality on black middle-class women; Fluid nature of racial identity
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Mary Kawena Pūkuʻi
Also found under Nonfiction, AAPI Writers, Award-Winners
Who Was She?
Mary Abigail Tui Kawena‘ulaokalaniohiʻiakaikapoliopelekawahineʻaihonua Wiggin was born in 1895 in Hawai'i to a mother from a long line of Hawaiian priestesses and a father descended from colonial governors, a cultural blend that had a major impact on her life and work. In accordance with an ancient Hawaiian tradition, she was raised by her maternal grandmother, a high priestess who taught her Hawaiian language, religion, and history through time-honored stories and ceremonies. When her grandmother passed away, Pukui insisted on continuing to be raised and educated in traditional Hawaiian culture, but her parents were keen for her to become bilingual and engage with Anglo-American culture and writers, including Anne Bradstreet. Pukui later graduated from the Hawaiian Mission Academy and began a family of her own, raising and educating her daughters in the Hawaiian culture and language. In the 1920s, she began working with Laura Green, the daughter of Hawaiian missionaries, and Dr. Martha Beckwith, among other scholars to translate the Hawaiian language, document chants and traditional tales, and preserve Hawaiian heritage. In 1923, she and Dr. Beckwith published Hawaiian Stories and Wise Sayings, and in 1933, she released her own book, Hawaiian Folktales, launching a lengthy career of writing and co-writing books. In 1937, she was hired by the Bishop Museum as a translator, cultural researchers, educator, and special projects consultant, working with anthropologists to shape critical bodies of research. She also collected oral histories, helped publish a Hawaiian language dictionary, and worked both independently in local communities and with international scholars to spread and share Hawaiian culture. Her work to preserve Hawaiian culture made her one of the most important figures in Hawaiian anthropological scholarship. Her many awards and honors include the First David Malo Award from the Rotary Club of West Honolulu, an Award of Merit from the City and County of Honolulu, and a Women of Communications Award from Theta Sigma Phi Honolulu.
What Did She Write About?
Hawaiian language, history, heritage, traditions, stories, and culture
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Mary TallMountain
Also found under Short Fiction, Poetry, Native American Writers, Award-Winners
Who Was She?
Mary TallMountain was born in Alaska in 1918 to a Scots/Irish father and a Koyukon/Athabaskan mother. When she was still young, her mother became gravely ill, and TallMountain was adopted and taken away from her village by a non-Native couple, an experience that left her distraught at being taken from her home village and overwhelmed by the popular culture of the continental U.S. As an adult, she wrote many stories and poems that described life along the Yukon River, where she was born, and being uprooted from its banks. For over two decades, she contributed significantly to the renaissance of Native American literature, and was published in many periodicals and anthologies across the U.S., including The Language of Life, The Harpers Anthology of Twentieth Century Native American Poetry, The Alaska Quarterly, and Animals Agenda. She has performed her work in live readings across California and Alaska, and in 1982 and 83, she won the Pushcart Prize. In 1989, Bill Moyes interviewed her and invited her to read for his poetry series, The Power of the Word, on PBS. Her work has been compiled into several collections, including The Light on the Tent Wall, (1990), A Quick Brush of Wings (1991), and the posthumous collection Listen To the Night (1995). She also was a longtime columnist for The Way, a Franciscan publication. Today, her work is used in many Native American Studies classes.
What Did She Write About?
Life on the Yukon River; Being uprooted from her homeland; Street life of San Francisco's inner-city
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Julia de Burgos
Also found under Poetry, Latinx Writers, Black Writers, Award-Winners
Who Was She?
Julia Constanza Burgos Garcia was born in Puerto Rico in 1914 and grew up in Santa Cruz. She graduated from the University of Puerto Rico with a teaching certificate at the age of 19 and joined the “daughters of freedom," or the Puerto Rican nationalist party. She went on to teach at the Barrio Cedro Arriba in Naranjito and in 1936, became general secretary of Frente Unido Femenino, where she gave speeches, penned letters, and advocated for Afro-Puerto Rican Nationalist Party president Pedro Albizu Campos release from prison. Later, she worked as a journalist in New York and studying at the University of Havana in Cuba. Upon returning to New York, she worked for the progressive newspaper Pueblos Hispanos as its arts and culture editor, voicing her support for Harlem's African American citizens. Her poetry collections include Poemas exactos a mi misma (1937), Poema en veinte surcos (1938), Canción de la verdad sencilla (1939), and the posthumously-published El mar y tú: otros poemas (1954), the first of which she self-publisized by travelling around Puerto Rico and giving readings and the last of which her sister published after her death. In total she wrote over 200 poems in her lifetime. She was also active in social justice-oriented arts, culture, and political events in Puerto Rico, Cuba, New York, and Washington D.C. throughout the 1940s and 50s. In 1939 and 1946, respectively, she won the Institutos de Literatura and Cultura Puertorriqueña poetry prizes, and received a posthumous, honorary doctorate from the University of Puerto Rico. Today, she is remembered as one of Puerto Rico's greatest poets, and several schools, cultural centers, and parks are named in her honor, including the Julia de Burgos Cultural Arts Center, the Julia de Burgos Latino Cultural Center, and Julia de Burgos Park.
What Did She Write About?
Feminism; Anti-imperialism; Love; Migration; Nature; Nationalism; Blackness
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Mitsuye Yamada
Also found under Poetry, Nonfiction, AAPI Writers, Award-Winners
Who Is She?
Mitsuye Yamada was born in 1923 in Japan and grew up in Seattle, Washington. In 1942, she and her family were taken to an internment camp when her father was wrongly accused of spying, and she and her brother were only released when they renounced their allegiance to Japan. She went on to earn her B.A. from New York University and her M.A. from the University of Chicago. Her poetry collections include Camp Notes and Other Poems (1976) and Desert Run: Poems and Stories (1988), and, in 1999, she published her nonfiction book, Teaching Human Rights Awareness Through Poetry. She has also collaborated with Nellie Wong and Merle Woo on 3 Asian American Writers Speak Out on Feminism (2003), and co-edited multiple anthologies, including Sowing Ti Leaves: Writing by Multicultural Women (1991). Yamada has also worked as a professor of English at several universities, is a founding member of Multicultural Women Writers of Orange Country, was a member of the Irvine chapter of Amnesty International, and was one of the subjects, along with Nellie Wong, of the documentary film Mitsuye and Nellie: Asian American Poets. In the late 1900s, she also hosted public readings and discussions of her poetry that turned increasingly political and often served as calls to action. She has received many awards and honors, including Pacific Asian-American Center Award for service to the Asian American community, Orange County Arts Alliance Literary Arts Award, and the Jesse Bernard Wise Women Award from the Center for Women's Policy Studies.
What Does She Write About?
Human rights, especially the rights of women and AAPI individuals; Japanese American heritage; Experience in internment camp; Politics
Where Can I Find Her Work?
This photo is from and has been edited and digitally restored by Chris Woodrich, and accessed via Wikimedia Commons. Displayed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. It has only been altered in size to fit this page.
Ntozake Shange
Also found under Poetry, Novels, Children’s Literature, Plays, Nonfiction, Black Writers, Award-Winners
Content Warning: Please note that this biography contains mentions of attempted suicide
Who Was She?
Ntozake Shange was born Paulette Williams in 1948, in New Jersey. She attended Barnard College, where she attempted suicide multiple times before channeling her frustration and grief toward the societal racism and limitations imposed on Black women. In 1970, she graduated from Barnard with a degree in American Studies, and went on to earn her Master's from the University of South Carolina three years later. While in graduate school, she adopted the name Ntozake Shange, names that mean, respectively, "she who comes from her own thing" and "she who walks like a lion" in Xhosa. She had written many books of poetry, including Ridin’ the Moon in Texas: Word Paintings; From Okra to Greens; A Daughter’s Geography; Nappy Edges; Natural Disasters and Other Festive Occasions; Melissa & Smith, and Three Pieces, which received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She also penned multiple plays, such as Daddy Says; Spell #7; From Okra to Greens/A Different Kinda Love Story; A Photograph: Lovers-in-Motion; and for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, a choreopoem that won an Obie Award and was nominated for a Tony, Grammy, and Emmy. Additionally, she is the author of a variety of children's books and prose works, including Some Sing, Some Cry, If I Can Cook You Know God Can, See No Evil: Prefaces, Essays & Accounts, 1976-1983, Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo: A Novel, and The Black Book, which she co-wrote with Robert Mapplethorpe. She also taught at several universities and won many awards and honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a fellowship from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, and a Pushcart Prize.
What Did She Write About?
Pain & struggles that racism and sexism cause for women; Conversational essays; Idiosyncratic punctuation and spelling; Internal lives of African Americans, Nicaraguans, Londoners, Barbadoans, Brazilians, and Africans; Multi-media poetry; Celibacy; Sexuality; Black women
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Luisa Capetillo
Also found under Nonfiction, Latinx Writers
Who Was She?
Luisa Capetillo was born in 1879 in Puerto Rico, to a French immigrant mother and a Spanish father. Her parents homeschooled her, instilling liberal values in her inspired by the French Revolution and the workers' rights movement in Northern Spain. As an adult, she became an anarchist, and worked as a reader in Arecibo tobacco factories, where she connected with important labor organizers and leaders. In 1905, she joined an agricultural workers strike, establishing herself as a well-known union leader and strong advocate for workers' rights. She went on to organize workers, publish union literature, and work with the Federación Libre de Trabajadores in the fight for women's suffrage, before publishing her book, Mi opinión sobre las libertades, derechos y deberes de la mujer (My opinion about the rights, liberties, and responsibilities of women), which became the first widely praised feminist thesis in Puerto Rico. Additionally, in 1915, Capetillo became the first woman in Puerto Rico to wear pants in public, leading her to be arrested and put on trial for allegedly "causing a scandal," a charge which she argued against and was acquitted of in court. A year later, she led her most famous strike: the Sugar Strike of 1916, which involved over 40,000 industrial workers and lasted for five months, ultimately resulting in salary increases for workers and setting an impressive precedent as one of the largest strikes in Puerto Rico's history. Capetillo's collected essays on these and other topics can be found in the book A Nation of Women.
What Did She Write About?
Feminism; Free love; Equal education; Critique of women's oppression; Socialism; Legalization of divorce; Sexuality; Mental and physical health; Hygiene, Spirituality; Nutrition
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Anne Spencer
Also found under Poetry, Black Writers, Native American Writers, Award-Winners
Who Was She?
Annie Bethel Scales Bannister was born in 1882 in Virginia to a former slave with Black, White, and Seminole Indian ancestry. At the age of 11, Spencer enrolled at the Virginia Seminary in Lynchburg, VA and graduated valedictorian of her class in 1899, excelling in literature and languages in particular. She went on to become a poet and avid civil rights advocate, hosting well-known African American intellectuals and providing lodging for African American travellers, since no hotels would admit them under Jim Crow laws. In 1918, she also co-founded the Lynchburg chapter of the NAACP and in 1920, her poem “Before the Feast of Shushan,” was published in The Crisis. In 1922, she was a featured poet in James Weldon Johnson's anthology, The Book of American Negro Poetry, and by 1931, she had been published in multiple magazines associated with the Harlem Renaissance, including The Crisis, Palms, and Opportunity. Spencer is often described as writing poems prolifically, penning words on any surface she could get her hands on, but publishing only a handful; in total, she published approximately 30 poems in her lifetime, with about 24 more appearing posthumously in J. Lee Greene's 1977 biography of her: Time’s Unfading Garden: Anne Spencer’s Life and Poetry. In 1973, she became the first female African American poet published in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. She also spent 20 years as a librarian and part time teacher at the Paul Laurence High School, an African American school, bringing in her own books from home to supplement the school library's lacking collection and campaigning for the hiring of more Black teachers. She served on multiple economic and social justice committees in her local community, wrote letters to newspaper editors and municipal officials, and patently refused to take segregated public transportation. In 2019, the United States Postal Service introduced a Forever Stamp design commemorating Spencer and her achievements as part of their "Voices of the Harlem Rennaissance" collection, which features many other historical greats, including novelist Nella Larsen. She has since been inducted into the Black Educator Hall of Fame.
What Did She Write About?
Short poems; Sonnets; Epigrams; Elegies; Religion; Nature; Her garden; Mythology
Where Can I Find Her Work?
The Poetry Foundation (Free)
Poem Hunter (Free)
AllPoetry.com (Free)
Nellie Wong
Also found under Poetry, Nonfiction, AAPI Writers, Award-Winners
Who Is She?
Nellie Wong was born in 1934 in California to Chinese immigrant parents. While in high school, she worked at her family's Chinese restaurant and, after graduating, took a job at Bethlehem Steel Corporation as a secretary. She went on to enroll in the Creative Writing program at San Francisco State University, and in 1983 her first book of poetry, Dreams in Harrison Railroad Park, was released. In 1983 she was also a delegate on the first United States Women Writers Tour to China. Her other volumes of poetry include Stolen Moments and The Death of Long Steam Lady, and in 1989, she was awarded the Women of Words Award from the San Francisco Women’s Foundation. She edited the 2015 collection Talking Back: Voices of Color, and is one of the founders of Unbound Feet, a collective that brings together Chinese American women writers in California. She has taught at both the University of Minnesota and Mills College, and has also collaborated with Mitsuye Yamada and Merle Woo on 3 Asian American Writers Speak Out on Feminism (2003). She, along with Yamada, was also one of the subjects of the documentary film Mitsuye and Nellie: Asian American Poets. Wong was also a delegate to the San Francisco Labor Council for University Professional and Technical Employees and a former Affirmative Action analyst. Today, she is an active member of Radical Women and the Freedom Socialist Party. In 2011, a section of Oakland High School was named after her.
What Does She Write About?
History; Identity; Immigration; Identity; Feminism; Racism; Sexism; Labor issues
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Merle Woo
Also found under Nonfiction, Poetry, Queer Writers AAPI Writers, Award-Winners
Who Was She?
Merle Woo was born in California in 1941 and grew up in a racist and sexist political and social climate. The prejudice against her only intensified when, while she was working as a teacher in the 1970s, she came out as lesbian. She has been fired from jobs twice, and each time she filed suits for reinstatement, fighting for the rights and dignity of LGBTQ+ individuals, a battle she has continued throughout much of her life through her writing and activism. She has written for newspapers, and has created or contributed to multiple films and books, including her collaboration with Nellie Wong and Mitsuye Yamada on 3 Asian American Writers Speak Out on Feminism (2003), her contributions to the 1981 anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, and her involvement in the making of “Mitsuye and Nellie, Asian American Poets.” She has also produced works of her own, including her well-known "Letter to Ma," and in 1994, she was awarded the Humanitarian Award. Today, she continues to live and work as a professor and as an activist for individuals who face societal prejudice based on gender, sexual orientation, or race.
What Did She Write About?
Marxism; Frustrations with family; Feminism; LGBTQ+ justice; Race
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Radicalesbians
Also found under Nonfiction, Queer Writers
Who Were They?
The Radicalesbians was a queer women’s feminist group active in the 1960s during the second wave of feminism in the U.S. Many straight feminists were opposed to lesbian politics, seeing lesbianism as a more sexual than a political issue, or believing feminism would eliminate the need for any sexuality labels, and thus lesbianism was irrelevant. Betty Friedan, president of the National Organization for Women at the time, called lesbians the “Lavender Menace,” claiming that incorporating lesbianism into feminism would undermine the feminist movement in the eyes of the public. As a result, many lesbians formed their own feminist groups, including Radicalesbians, led in part by writer and lesbian feminist activist Rita Mae Brown. The group is known for writing a political article called ‘The Woman Identified Woman,’ in which they became one of the first groups to publicly reclaim the term ‘Lavender Menace.’ In it, the authors argued that heterosexuality and homosexuality were categories established by a patriarchial society to divide and control women, and that lesbianism and “the primacy of women relating to women” was key to women’s liberation. At the Second Congress to Unite Women in 1970, Radicallesbians members and other lesbian feminists broke onto the stage in homemade ‘Lavender Menace’ t-shirts and passed out copies of ‘The Woman Identified Woman,’ resulting in two days of educational workshops on lesbianism and pro-lesbian resolutions being passed at the Congress’s final assembly.
What Did They Write About?
Lesbianism, Women’s rights, Politics, Society
Where Can I Find Their Work?
Pat Parker
Also found under Poetry, Queer Writers, Black Writers
Who Was She?
Patricia Cooks was born on January 20, 1944 in Houston, Texas. She grew up in poverty and graduated high school in 1962, going on to earn her BA from Los Angeles City College and her graduate degree from San Francisco State College. Parker came out as a lesbian in the 1960s, and was a key figure in the civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights movements in the Bay Area, sometimes reading her poetry aloud at events. She also helped create a lesbian poetry community on the West Coast, and penned five poetry collections: Jonestown and other madness (1985); Movement in Black (1978), Woman Slaughter (1978); Pit Stop (1975); and Child of Myself (1972). Her poems frankly discuss topics around sex, violence, alcoholism, motherhood, and race. Parker also was an active supporter of women’s health initiatives, especially those addressing domestic and sexual violence, serving as the director of the Oakland Feminist Women’s Health Center from 1978-1987. She also spoke before the United Nations on the status of women, joined two UN delegations on trips to Kenya, and helped establish the Black Women’s Revolutionary Council and the Women’s Press Collective. After her death in 1989, Parker’s work largely went out of print until 2016, when Sapphic Classics published The Complete Works of Pat Parker (2016).
What Did She Write About?
Sex, Violence, Alcoholism, Motherhood, Race
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Grace Livingston Hill
Also found under Short Fiction, Novels
Who Was She?
Grace Livingston Hill Lutz was born in 1865 in New York to a Presbyterian family of writers, including her father, Minister Charles Montgomery Livingston, her mother, Marcia Macdonald Livingston (whose name Lutz sometimes used as a pseudonym), and her aunt, Isabella Macdonald Livingston. Lutz herself wrote many popular short stories and more than 100 novels, including The Enchanted Barn, and is considered a pioneer of the Christian Romance genre, with most of her protagonists being young, innocent, and independent Christian women or women who converted to Christianity by the end of the story. She wrote her first book, which was likely either The Girl from Montana or Marcia Schuyler (the two were published very close together), to raise enough money to vacation in Chautauqua, New York when the family was living in Florida, and money remained a driving force behind much of her writing through periods of family and financial hardship. After her first husband passed away, she supported herself and her two young children on her writing income alone. Lutz was extremely popular with audiences, and though most of her writing contains strong religious themes, she modified her writing style in later years to appeal to a wider, non-religious audience as well. Her final book, Mary Arden, was completed by her daughter, Ruth Livingston Hill (who also went on to have a writing career), and released in 1947. Before beginning her professional writing career, Lutz taught calisthenics (club swinging, fencing, free work, wand, dumb-bell, and hoop exercises), Greek posture classes, and basketball at Rollins College, where she succeeded in campaigning for new uniforms for the women's basketball team and strongly opposed the segregation of classes based on gender.
What Did She Write About?
Romance; Religion/Christianity; Young female Christian protagonists; Strong and sensible female leads
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Hisaye Yamamoto
Also found under Short Fiction, Nonfiction, AAPI Writers, Award-Winners
Who Was She?
Hisaye Yamamoto was born in 1921 to Issei parents and grew up on a strawberry plantation situated between oil fields. She started reading as a young child, and, in her teenage years, frequently wrote for the newspaper Kashu Mainichi, helped create yearbooks for high school and junior college students, and studied four languages at Compton Junior College before graduating with an associate's of arts degree. In 1942, she was imprisoned in a government prison camp in Poston, Arizona, where she wrote articles and a serialized mystery entitled "Death Rides the Rails to Poston" for the prison newspaper, The Poston Chronicle. In 1944, she received leave to work as a cook, but came back after her 19 year old brother was killed in action fighting for the U.S. Army. In 1945, she applied to work as a reporter for the Los Angeles Tribune, a predominantly African American periodical, and was published in her first literary magazine at the age of 27. She then retired from reporting and began to write works of fiction and memoir full time. In 1950, she won the John Hay Whitney Foundation fellowship, and within about a year, had published stories in the Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, Harper's Bazaar, Carleton Miscellany, Arizona Quarterly, and Furioso. From 1953-1955, she lived and worked on a Catholic worker rehabilitation farm, before returning to California with her family and later suffering a nervous breakdown, resulting in a long hospital stay. Among her many published works are Seventeen Syllables, The Brown House, Yoneko's Earthquake, and Epithalamium, all of which were included in a yearly list of "Distinctive Short Stories" created by the editor of Random House's Story magazine. Additionally, Ýoneko's Earthquake was named one of the Best American Short Stories in 1952. Her further honors and awards include a Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1986, and an Award for Literature from the Association of Asian American Studies for Seventeen Syllables.
What Did She Write About?
Memoir, Mystery, Oppressed wives, Issei families, Romance/Young love
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Wakako Yamauchi
Also found under Short Fiction, Plays, AAPI Writers, Award-Winners
Who Was She?
Wakako Nakamura was born in 1924 in California to immigrant parents close to the Mexican border. At the age of seventeen, Yamauchi was imprisoned with her family in the Poston concentration camp in Arizona, where she worked on the camp newspaper and shared a passion for art and literature with Hisaye Yamamoto. A year and a half later, Yamauchi moved to Utah and then Chicago, where she worked at a candy factory and went to see plays. After World War II, she moved back to Los Angeles where she took painting classes from the Otis Arts Center and later studied short story writing. She became a known artist, and in 1960, she was asked to work on the holiday edition of a Japanese American newspaper, the Rafu Shimpo, where she soon became a regular contributor to the newspapers special editions. In the 1970s, her short story "And the Soul Shall Dance" was published in the anthology Aiiieeeee!, and caught the eye of the East West Players' artistic director, who encouraged her to adapt the story into a play script. The resulting production won the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for best new play of 1977, and was later aired as a PBS television drama. Yamauchi went on to write a number of other plays, including The Chairman’s Wife (1993), The Music Lessons (1993), and 12-1-A (1982), many of which were included in her 1994 collection, Songs My Mother Taught Me. She also received many honors and awards for her work, including multiple Rockefeller grants, the Brody Art Fund Fellowship, and the American Theater Critics Regional Award for Outstanding Play. Today, she is regarded as a key pioneer of Japanese American theatre.
What Did She Write About?
Individuals, especially Nisei and Issei women, who grapple with their dreams and passions and the psychological harm of prejudice, racism, economic depression, and the concentration camps of World War II; Resistance to patriarchal norms
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Martha Gellhorn
Also found under Nonfiction, Novels, Short Fiction, Plays, Award-Winners
Who Was She?
Martha Gellhorn was born in 1908 in Missouri, and graduated from John Burroughs High School. She briefly attended Bryn Mawr College, before leaving and getting a job as a journalist at The New Republic, a progressive political magazine, and later at The Albany Times Union. At the age of 21, she travelled to Paris and visited the New York Times bureau office there to inquire about a job. The bureau chief laughed in her face and turned her away. She ultimately found work with the United Press, but was harassed by a man affiliated with UP and filed a complaint. In the early 1930s, Gellhorn went on to write for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Vogue, travelling back and forth between the U.S. and France. In 1934, she also published What Mad Pursuit, her debut novel. During the Great Depression, she joined a Federal Emergency Relief Administration reporting team as the administration's youngest-ever investigator. As a member of the team, she travelled around the U.S., documenting the lives of people impacted by the Great Depression and becoming lifelong friends with Eleanor Roosevelt. She was fired from the team after she succeeded in encouraging a group of workers to riot against a corrupt contractor. In 1936, she published her observations and experiences in her second book, The Trouble I've Seen. Gellhorn went on to report on nearly ever major conflict of the 20th century, including the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism, China's war with Japan, World War II, and the Vietnam War, the latter of which she was so critical of U.S.'s involvement in that she was not allowed back into Vietnam to continue her reporting. After being denied an official reporting position and bluffing her way onto a hospital ship, she also became the only female reporter at D-Day, and saw the liberation of the Dachau Concentration Camp. In addition to her reporting and nonfiction writing, she also published several works of fiction, including Liana, A Stricken Field, and The Honeyed Peace: Stories, along with the play Love Goes to Press, which she co-wrote with fellow war correspondent Virginia Cowles. Her book In Sickness & In Health was also awarded the 1958 O. Henry Award.
What Did She Write About?
People-centric war stories; Politics; Romance; Backlash of racial divisions on women
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Virginia Hamilton
Also found under Children's Literature, Novels, Black Writers, Native American Writers, Award-Winners
Who Was She?
Virginia Esther Hamilton was born in 1936 and raised on a rural farm in Ohio. Her grandfather, who was formerly enslaved, would tell the Hamilton children about his escape to freedom on the underground railroad, stories that inspired much of Hamilton's writing. She attended Antioch College for three years before transferring to the Ohio State University and moving to New York to enroll at the New School for Social Research in 1957. Her first book, Zeely, was published in 1967, a children's book that was distinctive among the youth literature on race at the time, telling a pastoral children's tale whose characters just happened to be Black. Hamilton went on to publish over 35 more books during her lifetime, from children's picture books to novels, the most famous of which was M.C. Higgins, the Great, which won multiple awards, including the first-ever John Newberry Medal awarded to a Black author. She also won many other honors and awards, including an Edgar Allan Poe Award, a Coretta Scott King Award, a Hans Christian Andersen Medal, and an honorary doctorate from Ohio State.
What Did She Write About?
Pastoral children's literature; Biography; African American and Native American cultures and lore in the modern day; Environmental/mining literature
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Anna Lee Walters
Also found under Novels, Children's Literature, Poetry, Nonfiction, Short Fiction, Native American Writers, Award-Winners
Who Is She?
Anna Lee Walters was born in 1946 in Oklahoma to a Pawnee/Otoe-Missouria family. She graduated from Goddard College with a B.A., and later earned her MFA in Creative Writing. Since then, she has held jobs as a library technician at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and as a curriculum developer, editor and publisher, and Director of Public Relations and Information at Navajo Community College and Navajo Community College Press. In total, she has spent over 40 years writing, 15 years teaching, 10 years in administration, 7 years in publishing, and 29 years lecturing on Native American Literature, Writing, and other American Indian issues. She currently works as an Instructor in the Humanities at Dine College and is a consultant on Native American issues in addition to continuing her writing career, which has yielded many novels, children's books, collections of stories and poetry, essays, and nonfiction works, including The Sun is Not Merciful, The Two-legged Creature: An Otoe Story, The Pawnee Nation, and her most well-known, Ghost Singer. She has also been included in multiple anthologies and has won both the Virginia McCormick Scully Award and the 1986 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.
What Did She Write About?
Native Americans' stories, lives, and cultures; Personal reflections
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Mary Jobe Akeley
Also found under Nonfiction, Award-Winners
Who Is She?
Mary Jobe Akeley was born in 1886 in Ohio. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College, and went on to earn her MA at Columbia University. After serving as an instructor at Hunter College, she received a commission from the Canadian Government to gather information about the culture and history of Inuit and Native American communities in remote regions of northwest Canada. There, she mapped the Fraser River headwaters and later went back to explore the region's unexplored mountains, one of which, Mount Jobe, the Canadian Government named after her. After climbing the Canadian Rockies on several expeditions, she earned herself a reputation as a skilled explorer and mountaineer. In 1914, she bought a 45 acre patch of land in Mystic, Connecticut, settling there and hosting Camp Mystic for young girls, which ran for about fourteen years before closing in 1930 during the Great Depression. In 1926, she journeyed to Africa with her husband, and after he became sick and passed away in the mountains, Akeley buried him and took over as head of the expedition. She photographed and documented mountain gorillas and other African wildlife, collected specimens for the American Museum of Natural History, and upon returning to the U.S., she worked as an an advisor to the creation of the Great African Hall, or Carl Akeley's Hall of African Mammals, at the Museum of Natural History. She travelled back to Africa multiple times, and was an advocate for wildlife and resource conservation and the establishment of game preserves. She wrote several books about the continent, including Carl Akeley’s Africa (1929), Lions, Gorillas, and their Neighbors (1932), and Congo Eden (1950). She has won many honors, including the Knight's Cross of the Order of the Crown, awarded by King Albert of Belgium, and has been inducted into both the Ohio and Connecticut Women's Halls of Fame. Today, The Mary L. Jobe Akeley Trust & Peace Sanctuary headquartered in Mystic, Connecticut remains a key conservation organization.
What Did She Write About?
African wildlife and geography
Where Can I Find Her Work?
This photo is from online user Budfester and was accessed via Wikimedia Commons. Displayed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License. It has only been altered in size to fit this page.
Jean Craighead George
Also found under Children's Literature, Novels, Award-Winners
Who Is She?
Jean Craighead was born in 1919 in Washington D.C. and grew up surrounded by a family of naturalists, playing softball and hiking. She studied English and Science at Pennsylvania State University, graduating in 1941, and went on to study art at Louisiana State University and enroll in graduate school at the University of Michigan. From there, she became one of the first women to join the White House Press Corps. Around the late 1940s and 50s, she co-wrote several books, including the Aurianne Award-winning Dipper of Copper Creek, before going on to write her own widely popular series of novels. My Side of the Mountain, one of her first novels, won multiple awards, including a Newbery Honor, and was followed by two popular sequels. She also transformed her home in New York into a virtual zoo, with over one hundred wild animals settling into her house and yard. From 1969 to 1982, she worked for Reader's Digest, and later, published a number of juvenile novels, including Gull Number 737, Hold Zero!, and Coyote in Manhattan, in addition to a series of nonfiction books entitled Thirteen Moons. In the 1960s, she and her son travelled to Alaska to study wolf behavior with scientists, and on the trip, met members of the Inuit, whose culture and way of communicating with wolves would inspire one of her most popular novels, Julie of the Wolves, which was followed by two subsequent 'Julie' books.' She continued to write novels about the arctic, including Water Sky and The Wounded Wolf, as well as books about the continental United States and other areas of nature in the form of ecological mysteries and adventure stories. She also wrote independent nonfiction books, and collaborated with illustrators to write picture books, including Arctic Son and Nutik, the Wolf Pup, designed to introduce young children to the natural world. She was known for her ability to weave dramatic narratives together with nature, hoping her stories would connect with how children view nature, and inspire them to protect it. She won numerous awards, including the first-ever NYLA’s Knickerbocker Award, and a Newbery Medal for Julie of the Wolves.
What Did She Write About?
Nature, The Arctic, Continental U.S., Animals
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Nancy Mairs
Also found under Nonfiction, Poetry, Award-Winners, Writers with Disabilities
Who Was She?
Nancy Mairs was born in 1943 in California. After graduating from Wheaton College in 1964, she worked for the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge and the International Tax Program at Harvard Law School. When she was 28 years, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and and began using a wheelchair shortly after. She went on to earn her MFA in writing in 1975 and her Ph.D. in 1983, both from the University of Arizona. In 1984, she was awarded the Western States Book Award for Poetry, and she also penned a number of essays about her experiences and life as a self-dubbed 'cripple,' including "On Being a Cripple," "Sex and the Gimpy Girl," and the memoir “Waist High in the World.” In 1986, she published a revised version of her Ph.D. dissertation as the essay collection Plaintext. Throughout her life, Mairs wrote and spoke very publicly about her disability, about women's issues, and about her experiences with depression. Her essays often explored unanswerable questions about life and her experiences.
What Did She Write About?
Her experiences with multiple sclerosis, Marital infidelity, Management of depression, Personal life experiences
Where Can I Find Her Work?
K. Connie Kang
Also found under Nonfiction, Award-Winners, AAPI Writers
Who Was She?
Kyonshill Connie Kang was born in 1942 in modern-day North Korea. When she was about four years old, her family fled North Korea, eventually moving to Okinawa, Japan, and then to San Francisco. Through her travels to the U.S., she developed an affinity for English and writing, and went on to study journalism at the University of Missouri. In 1964, she earned her MA from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism as the school's first Korean graduate. After college, she worked as a reporter first with the Democrat & Chronicle in the the early 1960s, and then the San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco examiner. In 1992, she became the L.A. Times's first Korean-speaking reporter, and many Korean Americans were eager to get in touch with her, since, for the first time, they had someone they could share their stories with in their language. Kang devoted herself to raising up the voices of the previously underrepresented and neglected in the media. In her 1995 book "Home Was the Land of Morning Calm: A Saga of a Korean-American Family," she describes her experiences as a war refugee, immigrant, and Korean American woman, and in 1997, she won the Asian American Journalists Association's Lifetime Achievement Award. She also wrote a periodic column for Koreatown Weekly, and, in her later years, began writing articles on religion for the L.A. Times. Shortly before her death, she retired from the paper and became an ordained minister for the U.S. Presbyterian Church, with dreams of establishing a Christian school in North Korea.
What Did She Write About?
Religion, Experiences as an immigrant, Stories of Korean Americans, Duality of her Korean and American identity
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Angelina Weld Grimké
Also found under Poetry, Short Fiction, Plays, Black Writers, Queer Writers
Who Was She?
Angelina Weld Grimké was born in 1880 in Massachusetts to a white mother and a half-white, half-black father. Grimke grew up in a family with a legacy of racial justice advocacy, including her great aunts, Angelina and Sarah Grimké, who were well-known abolitionists. In 1902, Grimke graduated from the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics (present-day Wellesley College), where she earned a degree in Physical Education and also took classes at Harvard. She taught Physical Education and English in Washington D.C. until 1926, during which time she also wrote a number of poetry, short stories, and essays, many of which were published in The Crisis, The New Negro, Caroling Dusk, and in Robert Kerlin's Negro Poets and Their Poems. She also wrote a three act dramatic play that was performed by an all-black cast in 1916, making her one of the first African American women to have a play publicly performed. It was formally published in 1920, as a way for the NAACP to protest the film The Birth of Nation and educate Americans on the hardships and strife many black people in the country faced. Grimke wrote another play, Mara, that went unpublished, as well as a few other short stories such as The Closing Door and Goldie, but she gained notoriety principally for her poetry. After studying her diaries and journal entries, which discuss romantic attraction for both men and women, many modern scholars now suspect that she was queer, although unable to come out in her society. She spent her last years in New York, and inspired many artists of the Harlem Renaissance.
What Did She Write About?
Race, racism, and lynching; Death; Romantic attraction to women; Heartbreak; Motherhood
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Emily Ivanoff (Ticasuk) Brown
Also found under Nonfiction, Short Fiction, Award-Winners, Native American writers
Who Was She?
Emily Ivanoff Brown, often known by her Inuit name, Ticasuk, meaning "a hollow place in the ground [where the four winds store the treasure they gather from all parts of the world]" was born in 1904 in Alaska. She began her schooling when she was five years old, following her family's move from their hometown of Unalakleet to Shaktoolik. She was raised at a crossroads of culture, with her mother devoted to the traditional Inuit lifestyle and customs and her father tending more towards the "white man's ways." At about the age of fifteen, she enrolled at the Chemawa Indian School in Oregon and stayed in school there for nine years, completing her elementary and high school education and earning her teaching certificate. As a teacher, she became very concerned about the health risks in her village, and returned to school to study nursing, which she did for a while before returning to teaching to support herself and her children. In 1954, when Brown was fifty years old, she enrolled in a decade of summer school, earning a Bachelor's of Science degree in Education while maintaining a full-time teaching position. After graduating in 1964, she enrolled in another course on children who were physically disabled, and proceeded to take courses each summer well into her retirement from her 30 years as a teacher. In 1969, she settled on the campus of the University of Alaska, where she lived and took course every year for the rest of her life. In addition to her own schooling and teaching career, she is remembered for her work in preserving the culture of Alaskan Natives, writing a dictionary for the Malimiut dialect of the Inupiaq Inuit language, helping to design a classroom curriculum on the Inupiaq culture for young students, presenting at conferences, recording Native stories and cultures, and, in 1981, publishing her nonfiction book, Roots of Ticasuk. In 1982, she was awarded the governor's award for "outstanding service to her fellow Alaskans" at the Alaskan of the Year dinner. She earned numerous other awards and honors, including a presidential citation from President Richard Nixon and two citations from the Alaska legislature for her work.
What Did She Write About?
Native Alaskan stories, legends, and culture
Where Can I Find Her Work?
Pura Belpré
Also found under Children's Literature, Latinx Writers
Who Was She?
Pura Belpré was born circa 1900 in Puerto Rico, and graduated from Central High School in Santurce in 1919, before attending the University of Puerto Rico. She spent much of her adult life in New York, working first as a garment industry worker and then as a Hispanic Assistant in a branch of the public library at 135th Street in Harlem. She was the first Puerto Rican to be hired by the New York Public Library. During her time in the children's section of the library, she realized her love for storytelling, children's literature, and librarianship. She enrolled at the New York Public Library's Library School in 1926, where she wrote her first story, Pérez and Martina, which went on to become one of the first books published in English by a Puerto Rican in the mainland U.S. In 1929, she was moved to the 115th street branch of the library due to the high number of Puerto Ricans settling in the area. There, she established a number of new initiatives to help advocate for and serve the Spanish-speaking community, including bilingual story hours and themed programs for diverse holidays. She also purchased Spanish language books for the library, and could also be seen at meetings for civic organizations, such as the Porto Rican Brotherhood of America and La Liga Puertorriqueña e Hispana, working with both children and adults. Thanks to her work to diversify the library's programs and outreach, the 115th street branch became a known cultural hub for the Latinx community of New York City, and Belpré instituted similar programming and services at another branch. In the 1930s, she also began using puppet shows to engage children with the library and in reading. In 1943, she left her position to travel and write full-time. Her story, The Three Magi, was published in the 1944 anthology The Animals' Christmas by Anne Thaxter Eaton, and Belpré went on to publish The Tiger and the Rabbit and Other Tales, which was the first collection of Puerto Rican folktales ever published in the United States. She went on to pen a number of other works, in addition to being a successful editor and translator. She gathered and compiled stories from many parts of the globe, with a focus on preserving Puerto Rican heritage and culture. In 1960, Belpré took a part-time position as the Spanish Children's Specialist at the New York Public Library, moving from branch to branch to wherever Puerto Rican children needed her services most. She retired permanently from the New York Public Library staff in 1968, but began working with the South Bronx Library Project, an initiative designed to expand library outreach and patronage, and provide support services for Latinx families in the Bronx.
What Did She Write About?
Animals, Puerto Rican folktales, Folktales from other countries