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1295 books match the query 'Women authors' and 19 start with u

cover of Unbalancing Act

Unbalancing Act

M.M. Kelly

Four Way Books, 2026

Unbalancing Act is a haunting collection of poems about the particular physics of loving and losing—about the way grief, desire, memory, and awe can tip a life off its axis, and right it again. The speaker moves through fire and water, childhood, intimacy and abandonment, always with one eye on the natural world: bears, whales, rivers, storms, animals sleeping in impossible ways. The poems are lyric but narrative-driven, often darkly funny, and fascinated—bordering on obsessed—with the strange facts and small surrealities that make ordinary life feel mythic.

At its heart, the book is about imbalance as a kind of truth: the way trauma warps time, the way love can feel like weather, the way the body keeps trying to survive even when the mind wants to disappear. It's a collection for readers who like their beauty a little feral—poems that are tender but not precious, intelligent but not academic, and emotionally sharp without ever losing their sense of wonder.

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cover of Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions

Unbecoming Language

Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions

Annabel L. Kim

The Ohio State University Press, 2018

In Unbecoming Language, Annabel L. Kim examines a corpus of French writing against difference. Inaugurated by Nathalie Sarraute and sustained in the work of Monique Wittig and Anne Garréta, this corpus highlights three generations of the twentieth and recent twenty-first centuries and the direct chain of influence between them. Kim considers these writers, and the story of literature’s political potential, as a way of rereading and reinterpreting each writer’s individual corpus—rearticulating the strain of anti-difference feminist thought that has been largely forgotten in our (Anglo-American) histories of French feminisms.
 
Kim’s close readings ultimately enliven the current conversation in French studies by serving as a provocation to return to reading literary texts deeply and closely, without subordinating literature to a pre-existing ideological framework—to let literature speak, to let it theorize. Tracking the influence of these writers on each other, Kim provides a new, original French feminist poetics and demonstrates that Sarraute, Wittig, and Garréta’s work allows for a hollowing out of difference from within, allowing writers and readers to unbecome—to break free of identity and exist as subjectivities without subjecthood. In looking at these writers together, Kim provides a defense of literature as liberatory— capable of effecting personal and political change—and gives readers an experience of literature’s revolutionary possibilities.
 
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cover of Unbecoming Language: Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions

Unbecoming Language

Anti-Identitarian French Feminist Fictions

Annabel L. Kim

The Ohio State University Press, 2018

In Unbecoming Language, Annabel L. Kim examines a corpus of French writing against difference. Inaugurated by Nathalie Sarraute and sustained in the work of Monique Wittig and Anne Garréta, this corpus highlights three generations of the twentieth and recent twenty-first centuries and the direct chain of influence between them. Kim considers these writers, and the story of literature’s political potential, as a way of rereading and reinterpreting each writer’s individual corpus—rearticulating the strain of anti-difference feminist thought that has been largely forgotten in our (Anglo-American) histories of French feminisms.
 
Kim’s close readings ultimately enliven the current conversation in French studies by serving as a provocation to return to reading literary texts deeply and closely, without subordinating literature to a pre-existing ideological framework—to let literature speak, to let it theorize. Tracking the influence of these writers on each other, Kim provides a new, original French feminist poetics and demonstrates that Sarraute, Wittig, and Garréta’s work allows for a hollowing out of difference from within, allowing writers and readers to unbecome—to break free of identity and exist as subjectivities without subjecthood. In looking at these writers together, Kim provides a defense of literature as liberatory— capable of effecting personal and political change—and gives readers an experience of literature’s revolutionary possibilities.
 
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cover of Unbought and Unbossed: Transgressive Black Women, Sexuality, and Representation

Unbought and Unbossed

Transgressive Black Women, Sexuality, and Representation

Trimiko Melancon

Temple University Press, 2014

Unbought and Unbossed critically examines the ways black women writers in the 1970s and early 1980s deploy black female characters that transgress racial, gender, and especially sexual boundaries. Trimiko Melancon analyzes literary and cultural texts, including Toni Morrison’s Sula and Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, in the socio-cultural and historical moments of their production. She shows how representations of black women in the American literary and cultural imagination diverge from stereotypes and constructions of “whiteness,” as well as constructions of female identity imposed by black nationalism.

Drawing from black feminist and critical race theories, historical discourses on gender and sexuality, and literary criticism, Melancon explores the variety and complexity of black female identity. She illuminates how authors including Ann Allen Shockley, Alice Walker, and Gayl Jones engage issues of desire, intimacy, and independence to shed light on a more complex black identity, one ungoverned by rigid politics over-determined by race, gender and sexuality.
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cover of Unbroken Thread: An Anthology of Plays by Asian American Women

Unbroken Thread

An Anthology of Plays by Asian American Women

Roberta Uno

University of Massachusetts Press, 1993

This book contains plays by Genny Lim (Paper Angels), Wakako Yamauchi (The MusicLessons), Momoko Iko (Gold Watch),Velina Hasu Houston (Tea), Jeannie Barroga (Walls), and Elizabeth Wong (Letters to a Student Revolutionary). The volume includes an extended introduction, a profile of each playwright, and an appendix. The six plays of this anthology represent some of the best dramatic literature written by Asian American women since the 1970s. Each is a groundbreaking work and addresses in its own way the experiences of Asians in America. All six playwrights are American-born daughters of Asian immigrants, and their voices span the genres of naturalism, impressionism, ritual drama, postmodern collage, and media-influenced episodic drama.

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cover of Uncollected Early Prose of Katherine Anne Porter

Uncollected Early Prose of Katherine Anne Porter

Edited by Ruth Moore Alvarez and Thomas F. Walsh

University of Texas Press, 1993

This volume brings together twenty-nine pieces dating from before 1932, none of which appeared in Porter's collected works and many of which are published here for the first time. Both fiction and essays are covered. All these pieces belong to Porter's apprenticeship as a creative writer. Thus, they offer new insights into her artistic development and her relationship with Mexico, a place that, as she later said, "influenced everything I did afterward."

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cover of Uncommon Women: Gender and Representation in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women's Writing

Uncommon Women

Gender and Representation in Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women's Writing

Laura Laffrado

The Ohio State University Press, 2009

Uncommon Women discusses provocative, highly readable, nineteenth-century American texts that complicate notions of self-writing and female agency. This feminist study considers the generic forms, language, and illustrations of a group of complex and often daring texts, including Sarah Kemble Knight’s unconventional travel Journal (1825); Fanny Fern’s controversial newspaper essays (1851–72); Civil War nurse Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches (1863); and cross-dressed soldier’s S. Emma E. Edmonds’s Nurseand Spy in the Union Army (1865), along with later women’s war reminiscences. The study concludes with a fresh reading of neglected aspects of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), the primary Black female autobiographical text of the century, which fundamentally displays what whiteness enabled.
 
Uncommon Women reveals attempts of white middle-class women to both violate and align themselves with gendered assumptions. In doing so, it makes visible the ways in which these texts disputed restrictive female constructions, tested boundaries of race and class, and anticipated reaction to their disruptive discourses. The resulting conflicted self-representations illuminate the vexed contours of women’s autobiography.
This study’s findings make plain the impact of white/male discourses of gender on women’s self-narrativeand illustrate how unconventional women were pressured to embrace domesticity, heterosexuality, marriage, motherhood, and political passivity.
 
 
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cover of Unconventional Politics: Nineteenth-Century Women Writers and U.S. Indian Policy

Unconventional Politics

Nineteenth-Century Women Writers and U.S. Indian Policy

Janet Dean

University of Massachusetts Press, 2016

Throughout the nineteenth century, Native and non-Native women writers protested U.S. government actions that threatened indigenous people's existence. The conventional genres they sometimes adopted—the sensationalistic captivity narrative, sentimental Indian lament poetry, didactic assimilation fiction, and the mass-circulated commercial magazine—typically had been used to reinforce the oppressive policies of removal, war, and allotment. But in Unconventional Politics Janet Dean explores how four authors, Sarah Wakefield, Lydia Huntley Sigourney, the Muscogee/Creek S. Alice Callahan, and the Cherokee Ora V. Eddleman, converted these frameworks to serve a politics of dissent. Intervening in current debates in feminist and Native American literary criticism, Dean shows how these women advocated for Native Americans by both politicizing conventional literature and employing literary skill to respond to national policy.

Dean argues that in protesting U.S. Indian policy through popular genres, Wakefield, Sigourney, Callahan, and Eddleman also critiqued cultural protocols and stretched the contours of accepted modes of feminine discourse. Their acts of improvisation and reinvention tell a new story about the development of American women's writing and political expression.
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cover of Under a Pannonian Sky: Ten Women Poets from Hungary

Under a Pannonian Sky

Ten Women Poets from Hungary

Edited by Ottilie Mulzet

Seagull Books, 2025

A ground-breaking anthology showcasing the voices of ten remarkable Hungarian women poets for English-language readers.

Under a Pannonian Sky is a landmark anthology that brings the voices of ten extraordinary Hungarian women poets to English readers. Edited by award-winning translator Ottilie Mulzet, this collection spans generations, offering a rare glimpse into the rich and complex world of Hungarian poetry. The anthology features renowned poets like Ágnes Nemes Nagy and Zsuzsa Rakovszky, whose works have been celebrated internationally, alongside voices such as Gizella Hervay and Magda Székely, who are introduced in-depth to English readers for the first time. Through original and lyrical language, these poets chronicle the traumas of World War II, the Hungarian Holocaust, and the societal upheavals of the 1989 regime change, exploring themes of identity and resilience. Their poems reflect deeply personal confrontations with their roles as citizens, daughters, mothers, and witnesses to turbulent and often disorienting historical epochs.

Under a Pannonian Sky is an essential collection for readers seeking to discover the richness of Hungarian poetry and its profound engagement with the personal and political landscapes of the twentieth century and beyond.
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cover of Underneath the Palm Trees: Essays

Underneath the Palm Trees

Essays

Eva Recinos

Northwestern University Press, 2027

A raw and captivating exploration of what it means to live in the in-betweens of the American dream

Arts and culture writer Eva Recinos came of age in the towering city of Los Angeles, fed the story of the American dream. A daughter of immigrants, Recinos grew up facing the dichotomy of that dream: experiencing what it was like to live in South Central LA right next door to one of the wealthiest private universities in America—which Recinos herself would eventually attend. Navigating depression, anxiety, grief, sexuality, and the pressures of being a first-generation daughter and student, Underneath the Palm Trees examines the dissonant effects of straddling two disparate worlds. Recinos’s is an emerging and powerful Latinx voice that uses this engaging collection of essays to capture America’s idiosyncrasies, the complexities of girlhood, and how we find ourselves in art.

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cover of Underscore

Underscore

Julie Carr

Omnidawn, 2024

Tender lyric poetry dedicated to two of the poet’s most influential late teachers.
 
Julie Carr’s most intimate book to date, Underscore, is dedicated to two of Carr’s foundational teachers, the dancer Nancy Stark Smith and the poet Jean Valentine, both of whom died in 2020. Elegiac and tender—at times erotic at other times bitter—these poems remain deeply invested in human relationships amid a life whose backdrop is human suffering.
 
Reaching toward the “ghost companions in the thicket” and to the beloveds who still “pulse with activity,” Underscore’s sonically intricate poems express a longing for dynamic forces of intra-action, a sense of expanded encounter, and what Stark Smith called “overlapping kinespheres.”
 
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cover of Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England

Uneven Developments

The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England

Mary Poovey

University of Chicago Press, 1988

Mary Poovey's The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer has become a standard text in feminist literary discourse. In Uneven Developments Poovey turns to broader historical concerns in an analysis of how notions of gender shape ideology.

Asserting that the organization of sexual difference is a social, not natural, phenomenon, Poovey shows how representations of gender took the form of a binary opposition in mid-Victorian culture. She then reveals the role of this opposition in various discourses and institutions—medical, legal, moral, and literary. The resulting oppositions, partly because they depended on the subordination of one term to another, were always unstable. Poovey contends that this instability helps explain why various institutional versions of binary logic developed unevenly. This unevenness, in turn, helped to account for the emergence in the 1850s of a genuine oppositional voice: the voice of an organized, politicized feminist movement.

Drawing on a wide range of sources—parliamentary debates, novels, medical lectures, feminist analyses of work, middle-class periodicals on demesticity—Poovey examines various controversies that provide glimpses of the ways in which representations of gender were simultaneously constructed, deployed, and contested. These include debates about the use of chloroform in childbirth, the first divorce law, the professional status of writers, the plight of governesses, and the nature of the nursing corps. Uneven Developments is a contribution to the feminist analysis of culture and ideology that challenges the isolation of literary texts from other kinds of writing and the isolation of women's issues from economic and political histories.
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cover of Unfolding the City: Women Write the City in Latin America

Unfolding the City

Women Write the City in Latin America

Anne Lambright

University of Minnesota Press, 2007

The city is not only built of towers of steel and glass; it is a product of culture. It plays an especially important role in Latin America, where urban areas hold a near-monopoly on resources and are home to an expanding population. The essays in this collection assert that women’s views of the city are unique and revealing. For the first time, Unfolding the City addresses issues of gender and the urban in literature—particularly lesser-known works of literature—written by Latin American women from Mexico City, Santiago, and Buenos Aires. The contributors propose new mappings of urban space; interpret race and class dynamics; and describe Latin American urban centers in the context of globalization.Contributors: Debra A. Castillo, Cornell U; Sandra Messinger Cypess, U of Maryland; Guillermo Irizarry, U of Massachusetts, Amherst; Naomi Lindstrom, U of Texas, Austin; Jacqueline Loss, U of Connecticut; Dorothy E. Mosby, Mount Holyoke College; Angel Rivera, Worcester Polytechnic Institute; Lidia Santos, Yale U; Marcy Schwartz, Rutgers U; Daniel Noemi Voionmaa, U of Michigan; Gareth Williams, U of Michigan.Anne Lambright is associate professor of modern languages and literature at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. Elisabeth Guerrero is associate professor of Spanish at Bucknell University.
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cover of Unsettled Subjects: Restoring Feminist Politics to Poststructuralist Critique

Unsettled Subjects

Restoring Feminist Politics to Poststructuralist Critique

Susan Lurie

Duke University Press, 1997

During the 1980s much of the work of feminist theory aimed to fully account for issues of class, race, and sexuality that previously had been overlooked. Susan Lurie argues that this work tended to privilege questions of race and class at the expense of gender, and frequently, if inadvertently, left patriarchal power unquestioned. Developing a feminist model that keeps multiple political forces in view, Lurie returns to three literary feminists from earlier parts of the century: Ellen Glasgow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Elizabeth Bishop. As Lurie argues, each of these women shows that both resistance to male domination and alliances between different oppositional politics rely on recognizing how power regulates a subject’s multiple beliefs.
In her analysis, Lurie traces each author’s strategies for revealing and challenging the ways that patriarchal gender ideology profits from what is always plural and contested female subjectivity. Only such an inquiry, Lurie demonstrates, can explain the impasses that have steered poststructuralist feminism away from gender as a category of analysis and can point toward the models necessary for a more complete feminist critique of patriarchal power.
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cover of Unshuttered: Poems

Unshuttered

Poems

Patricia Smith

Northwestern University Press, 2023

National Book Award winner Patricia Smith presents a portrait of Black America in the nineteenth century 
 
Over the course of two decades, Patricia Smith has amassed a collection of rare nineteenth-century photographs of Black men, women, and children who, in these pages, regard us from the staggering distance of time.  

Unshuttered is a vessel for the voices of their incendiary and critical era. Smith’s searing stanzas and revelatory language imbue the subjects of the photos with dynamism and revived urgency while she explores how her own past of triumphs and losses is linked inextricably to their long-ago lives:  

We ache for fiction etched in black and white. Our eyes never touch. These tragic grays and bustles, mourners’ 
hats plopped high upon our tamed but tangled crowns, strain to disguise what yearning does with us. 

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cover of Upkeep

Upkeep

Sara London

Four Way Books, 2019

The poems in Sara London’s Upkeep offer a guidebook for both coping with and negotiating the difficult terrain of life after great personal loss. In the book’s opening section, the speaker explains to a Martian the ways we earthlings attempt to raise our dead—“you’ll find that with dreams // we exhume our dead without the mess /of upturned dirt”—and later finds comfort in objects that connect her to her late Mr. Fix-It father. These are elegies whose solemnity has been upended by humor and the nuanced interrogations of the daily rituals that heal us. “How do you / do it, start the experiment— / gas up, each day, anew?” she asks. Oatmeal and duct tape help, London suggests, but ultimately the heart decides: The “old tubes, they play on.”
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cover of u&i

u&i

Cassandra Smith

Omnidawn, 2015

u&i is a meditation on the imaginary—what exists and what doesn’t, how does something exist when it knows it is imaginary, how is it to be reckoned with. u&i asks what exists when a book is written. u&i is telling a story to the things that are actual loss. Things that are gone become further proof of existence and not. u&i asks what are the can and can’t of existence, as well as the cant of existence—the domestic and repeating cant, as things circle themselves until they think they exist a little more. There is, in u&i, cant as incantation.
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cover of unalone

unalone

Jessica Jacobs

Four Way Books, 2024

“Make a fence, said the rabbis, around the Torah,” reads the first line of Jessica Jacobs' unalone. By the end of this opening poem, however, Jacobs has defined her engagement with religious texts as an act of devotion to living fully in the world’s complexity: “Here, love, is fruit with the sun still inside it. Let me // thumb the juice from your chin. Let us honor what we love / by taking it in.” Structured around the twelve parshiyot (portions) of Genesis, the trajectory of unalone parallels immersion in Jewish teachings with the contemporary world. Whether conversing with the sacred texts she reads or writing from her subjects' perspectives, Jacobs navigates an abundance of experiences: growing up queer, embracing one's sexuality, reversing roles as the adult child of aging parents, wrestling with religious history and the imposed roles of womanhood, exploring how the past foreshadows our current climate crisis, and revisiting the blush of new love while cataloging the profound, though more familiar, joys of a long relationship. 


Deeply personal and yet universal in its truths, unalone draws on the Book of Genesis as a living document whose stories, wisdom, and ethical knots can engage us more fully with our own lives — whatever your religious tradition or spiritual beliefs. In this stunning and ambitious book, Jacobs reminds us that all poetry serves as a kind of prayer – a recognition of beauty, a spoken bid for connection, a yearning toward an understanding that might better guide us through our days. When you “dive / from the twin heights of your eyes,” “that tiny pool below” isn’t God. “Well, not exactly,” Jacobs comforts us. “It’s you. One breath deeper than you’ve / ever been, one breath closer to the heeded, heedful world.” 
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cover of unalone

unalone

Jessica Jacobs

Four Way Books, 2024

“Make a fence, said the rabbis, around the Torah,” reads the first line of Jessica Jacobs' unalone. By the end of this opening poem, however, Jacobs has defined her engagement with religious texts as an act of devotion to living fully in the world’s complexity: “Here, love, is fruit with the sun still inside it. Let me // thumb the juice from your chin. Let us honor what we love / by taking it in.” Structured around the twelve parshiyot (portions) of Genesis, the trajectory of unalone parallels immersion in Jewish teachings with the contemporary world. Whether conversing with the sacred texts she reads or writing from her subjects' perspectives, Jacobs navigates an abundance of experiences: growing up queer, embracing one's sexuality, reversing roles as the adult child of aging parents, wrestling with religious history and the imposed roles of womanhood, exploring how the past foreshadows our current climate crisis, and revisiting the blush of new love while cataloging the profound, though more familiar, joys of a long relationship. 


Deeply personal and yet universal in its truths, unalone draws on the Book of Genesis as a living document whose stories, wisdom, and ethical knots can engage us more fully with our own lives — whatever your religious tradition or spiritual beliefs. In this stunning and ambitious book, Jacobs reminds us that all poetry serves as a kind of prayer – a recognition of beauty, a spoken bid for connection, a yearning toward an understanding that might better guide us through our days. When you “dive / from the twin heights of your eyes,” “that tiny pool below” isn’t God. “Well, not exactly,” Jacobs comforts us. “It’s you. One breath deeper than you’ve / ever been, one breath closer to the heeded, heedful world.” 
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