VIDA
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VIDA Launches Roundtable Discussion Series
VIDA is launching a new roundtable discussion series on issues in writing by women on June 2nd at Housing Works Bookstore in Manhattan. The event is the first of a series that will take place every fall and winter/spring. This time,…
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Art is What We Buy
Literature and commercial publishing have a diversity problem. People of color and women are both in short supply. Rumpus contributor Daniel Peña, writing at Plougshares, offers a market-based explanation: But I wonder how much these problems stem not from MFA…
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A Book Review Column That Isn’t All About White Men
As VIDA’s annual stats have made very clear, most publications favor male writers reviewing books by other male writers. Our inimitable essays editor Roxane Gay has also talked about the lack of representation of writers of color in many publications.…
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NYRB Joins LRB in Hole, Helps Keep Digging
As we’ve documented pretty extensively before, arts organization VIDA has done a lot to expose gender inequality in the writing world with its annual count comparing female bylines to male ones in a number of publications. The New York Review of Books‘ ratio has…
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LRB Finds Itself in Hole, Keeps Digging
We’ve written a fair amount about this year’s VIDA numbers. We even featured an essay by Andrew Ervin, a writer who realized he was part of the problem—only 23.5% of the books he had reviewed during his career were by women.…
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Props from a Fellow Funny Woman
Poet, memoirist, and Beat figure Hettie Jones is, like most of us, unhappy about sexism in the publishing industry. In a blog post on the subject, she discusses VIDA statistics, Deborah Copaken Kogan’s Nation essay, and (drumroll!) Elissa Bassist’s amazing Funny…
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Women Writers and the Interview
Are male and female writers interviewed equally? Loraine Berry at Talking Writing thinks not. It’s gone to show that interviewers are often more interested in a female writer’s dietary habits and marital problems than their literary processes and work. Jodi…
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What VIDA Stats Mean on A Personal Level
This year’s VIDA stats gave us a (depressing) wide-lens view of women’s status in the writing industry, but for a (depressing) close-up perspective, read Deborah Copaken Kogan’s recent essay in The Nation about the sexism she’s encountered during her career as a photographer…
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On Being Part of the Problem: A Personal Response to the VIDA Report
I’ve done the math and it turns out that I’m part of the problem.
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Making VIDA Count
We reached out to several of the worst offenders to ask where they thought they had gone wrong…but got very little in the way of responses. So we decided, instead, to reach out to the editors of the publications that…
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Women Still Not Equal in Writing World
VIDA, the organization that tracks the status of women in the writing world, has posted their annual count of female writers published in major literary magazines in comparison to male writers published in the same places. This year, they’ve posted…
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An Open Letter
On her blog today, respected critic Ruth Franklin wrote an open letter to the editors of Bookforum. She writes: I have considered opting out of writing for magazines at which women are not represented among the top editors, such as Bookforum. But…