Paperback Edition
ISBN: 9781558614673
Publication Date: 05-15-2004

Foreword by Suheir Hammad

From Margaret Atwood to Edwidge Danticat, Assia Djebar to Luisa Valenzuela, some of the world's most famous literary voices mediate on what it means to be a woman writer. Despite their increased visibility, women who write are still thought to be different—sometimes celebrated, sometimes viewed with suspicion and condescension. This fresh collection brings together an international host of women who explore, defy, and embrace "the woman writer": an indispensable muse to some, a troublesome burden to others, a defiant, even life-threatening identity to others still. Taking nothing—certainly not the meanings of "woman" or "writer"—as given, these writers explore the varied pleasures and dangers of writing as women in the contemporary world.

"This collection serves as a powerful tool to challenge the 21st-century difficulties that women writers face, particularly violence, censorship, and marginalization. . . . Highly recommended." —Library Journal

"The contributors, hailing from the world over, plumb the depths of their experience with the word—both its delights and ganders. The breadth of voices included is groundbreaking—from Port-au-Prince to Kerala, Dublin to Algiers. These writers make clear what many of us take for granted in the United States: that writing and the word are for most of the women in the world of a matter of life and death." —Caledonia Kearns, editor of Cabbage and Bones: An Anthology of Irish-American Women's Fiction