A Spirit Born into a Human Body: Talking with Akwaeke Emezi
Akwaeke Emezi discusses her debut novel, Freshwater, her public and private identities, and deciding when to translate culture for readers.
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Posts Tagged: women writers
Rumpus Exclusive: “In the Kitchen”
Women grooming their daughters to be good housewives teach them how to cook, no? A woman grooming her daughter to be something else in the world would keep her out of the kitchen.
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Morgan Jerkins
Morgan Jerkins discusses This Will Be My Undoing, getting her start on the Internet, and why her collection of linked personal essays isn’t just another Millennial read.
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An Ethnography of the Self: Talking with Morgan Parker
Morgan Parker discusses her writing process, approaching an idea from various forms, and how moving from NYC to L.A. has changed her work.
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What to Read When You Want to Read Women on Home
A list from Margot Kahn and Kelly McMasters to celebrate the release of This Is the Place: Women Writing about Home.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Barbara Jane Reyes
Barbara Jane Reyes discusses her new collection Invocation to Daughters, poly-vocality in poetry, and the importance of centering women’s voices.
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“The Book I Said I Would Never Write”: Talking with Karolina Ramqvist
Karolina Ramqvist discusses The White City, her first novel to be translated to English, and the idea of a writer’s persona out in the world versus a just being a writer, writing.
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Erika T. Wurth
Erika T. Wurth talks about her latest book, Buckskin Cocaine, persevering through rejection, and white writers writing Native characters.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #81: Chanelle Benz
Chanelle Benz’s debut collection, The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead, is filled with characters often facing a moral crossroads. The stories contain the unexpected, like a classic Western complete with local brothel as well as a gothic tale. Benz’s writing has appeared in Electric Literature, Guernica, The American Reader, and Granta.
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The Rumpus Interview with Roxane Gay
Roxane Gay discusses her new collection, Difficult Women, the problem with whiteness as the default and the need for diverse representation, and life as a workaholic.
...moreThe Swiping Game
Over at Lit Hub, Bridget Read discusses the gender politics of Tinder, the rise of the Single Woman, and how these phenomena have permeated recent nonfiction by women: It makes sense that independence would be their chosen frontier, the pursuit of solitude their manifest destiny. The ability to be alone has long been the provenance […]
...moreElena Ferrante and the Picture on the Back Cover
Essayist Marie Myung-Ok Lee’s obsession with author photos leads to authorial reflections on gender, representation, and what writers owe the public in “Occupy Author Photo: On Elena Ferrante, Privacy, and Women Writers” at The Millions. Starting with her own experiences and branching out to Mary Oliver, Sarah Howe, and eventually Elena Ferrante, she calls for […]
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Abigail Ulman
Abigail Ulman talks about her debut collection Hot Little Hands, the limitations of the cultural narrative, her paralyzing pre-publication fears, and why she loves adolescent narrators.
...moreCall for Submissions: Emrys Journal
“Funny Women” submissions don’t read themselves. Most of the time Assistant Regional Funny Woman Katie Burgess reads them (she wrote the infinitely funny “How to Read a Poem,” anthologized in Oxford University Press’s Humor: A Reader for Writers, and has since gone on to read slush). Katie, now Editor-in Chief of Emrys Journal, wants women and gender nonconforming writers to […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Robin MacArthur
Robin MacArthur discusses her debut story collection Half Wild, life in rural Vermont, and how narrative—and fiction—is key to reaching across what divides us.
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Anna March’s Reading Mixtape #24: Pussy Riot
This column has been on hiatus since the springtime and I’m happy to be back. I’ve been reading so much—mostly books by women—this summer. While I’ve been away, I’ve been thinking about gender more than ever, if you can believe that. I’ve also been hanging out with some younger women, observing their strengths, and appreciating […]
...moreThe Pleasure of Recognition
Ferrante’s novels about women like Lila and Lenu are a potent reminder that working-class women’s perspectives are out there, even if we can’t always hear each other, even if we’re sometimes embarrassed and alone, even if we feel exasperated by a system that valorizes experiences and credentials that we can never claim. At VIDA, Valeria […]
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Jaquira Díaz
Jaquira Díaz discusses the challenge of writing about family members, her greatest joy as a writer, and her literary role models.
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The Rumpus Interview with Annie DeWitt
Annie DeWitt discusses her debut novel, White Nights in Split Town City, the 90s, and the brutality of nature.
...moreFiction’s Rise of Female Friendships
Readers are shifting focus from outdated gender expectations and conceptions of identity, and as a result, complex, non-compartmentalized female friendships are blooming in fiction. Books about these friendships are spaces for female writers and readers to explore the complexity of their relationships and selves without the influence of men, whose presence can quickly turn a […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Leigh Stein
Leigh Stein discusses her new memoir, Land of Enchantment, co-founding Out of the Binders, and why most of her projects begin as “an idea that someone else pushes back on.”
...moreA Women’s Place
Most of these sites were beloved exactly for that same dual sense of security and inclusion members loved — and when that sense was lost, from time or toxicity or something else, the woman who made them moved on to another new place. For The Hairpin, Julia Carpenter writes about the community spaces women have carved for themselves […]
...moreThese Are My Confessions
Many poets—male poets especially—are secretly anxious that someone will call their poetry a frivolous, feminine pursuit. And instead of embracing the potential charge of frivolity—allowing themselves to be free of it or even to toy with it—those same poets draw lines in the sand with real-and-serious-capital-P-Poetry on one side, and lesser, feminized poetry on the other. For […]
...moreLabor of Love
Writing as art can be what economists call a “non-market” activity. The time we spend writing poems or novels, like the time we spend doing laundry, is usually time not spent earning a dollar, even if we hope to see payment for that work down the line. But unlike domestic work, it can be difficult […]
...moreAt the End of All Books
For Lenny Letter, Alexis Coe writes on the gendered politics behind book acknowledgements, including acknowledgment of emotional labor, research, and the expectations behind praise for female and male partners.
...moreThe Forgotten Women Writers of the 19th Century
Over at Lit Hub, Anne Boyd Rioux discusses the literary genius of the 19-century novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, and the American tradition of “the diminution of women writers” that continues today: Woolson’s literary star faded quickly after her death in 1894, a time of shifting literary tastes. With the advent of literary modernism, her work […]
...moreFalse Dichotomy
Can women really have it all? Like, all of it? But how could they possibly have multiple things at the same time? How can they even think human thoughts after they’ve subsumed their corporeal selves into an all-encompassing prison of motherhood? For Lit Hub, miraculous hybrid mother/writer Diana Abu-Jaber explains that art and babies aren’t […]
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Tania James
Tania James discusses her most recent novel, The Tusk That Did the Damage, the challenges of writing an elephant narrator, and the moment when she knew she could be a writer.
...moreAre You the Woman Reader?
It’s not that the books that get someone into the “serious reader” club are all or even mostly by men these days. But the books that get you kicked out of the club are almost exclusively written by women. Hannah Engler writes for Book Riot on “women’s literature” and the still-unevolved stereotype of the Woman Reader.
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Idra Novey
Swati Khurana talks with novelist and translator Idra Novey about the challenges and joys of translation, the idiosyncrasies of language, the inextricable reception of women’s writing and women’s bodies, and much more.
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