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Winner of the National Indie Excellence Award in Memoir and the National Indie Excellence Awards Juror's Choice Prize

A compelling and inventive memoir exploring how pain and pleasure are passed down through generations of women

For years, Lauren W. Westerfield looked back at her childhood as an imaginative playscape lovingly crafted by her artist mother. But in truth, theirs was always a fraught relationship, close yet turbulent. It wouldn’t be until her mid-twenties that Westerfield would learn that her mother was assaulted while living as a single woman in 1970s Los Angeles, or until her mid-thirties when caretaking for her now chronically ill mother during pandemic lockdown would reveal how that earlier incident and its ripple effects had shaped both their lives.

The essays and assemblages in this book plumb the depths of two women’s experiences, exploring the pain and pleasure they find in their bodies, in culture, and in their own art. Violence, beauty, and love reverberate and dissipate and shape the forms and psyches of these two profoundly connected family members. At once raw and refined, narrative and lyrical, nostalgic and blunt, the stories and images presented here explore Westerfield’s life—from childhood to adulthood—passing through innocence, self-discovery and familial tethers. In unpacking her mother’s history and the complexities of their relationship, Westerfield finds herself confronted with her own story: one grounded in a yearning for agency and individuation, of a body and mind groomed to be at odds with one another, of a feminist politics examining deeply rooted patriarchal understandings of beauty, control, and power.

Part memoir, part critical sense-making, part reckoning with family, identity, illness, addiction, art, and inheritance, Woman House draws on diverse inspirations in an attempt to recontextualize the female body—in danger, in pleasure, in portraiture, in proximity, in resistance—and challenge the structures that silence and restrict female expression. 

Georgie White Clark-adventurer, raconteur, eccentric--first came to know the canyons of the Colorado River by swimming portions of them with a single companion. She subsequently hiked and rafted portions of the canyons, increasingly sharing her love of the Colorado River with friends and acquaintances. At first establishing a part-time guide service as a way to support her own river trips, she went on to become perhaps the canyons' best-known river guide, introducing their rapids to many others-on the river, via her large-capacity rubber rafts, and across the nation, via magazine articles and movies. Georgie Clark saw the river and her sport change with the building of Glen Canyon Dam, enormous increases in the popularity of river running, and increased National Park Service regulation of rafting and river guides. Adjusting, though not always easily, to the changes, she helped transform an elite adventure sport into a major tourist activity.

Marina Goldovskaya is one of Russia's best-known documentary filmmakers. The first woman in Russia (and possibly the world) to combine being a director, writer, cinematographer, and producer, Goldovskaya has made over thirty documentary films and more than one hundred programs for Russian, European, Japanese, and American television. Her work, which includes the award-winning films The House on Arbat Street, The Shattered Mirror, and Solovky Power, has garnered international acclaim and won virtually every prize given for documentary filmmaking.

In Woman with a Movie Camera, Goldovskaya turns her lens on her own life and work, telling an adventurous, occasionally harrowing story of growing up in the Stalinist era and subsequently documenting Russian society from the 1960s, through the Thaw and Perestroika, to post-Soviet Russia. She recalls her childhood in a Moscow apartment building that housed famous filmmakers, being one of only three women students at the State Film School, and working as an assistant cameraperson on the first film of Andrei Tarkovsky, Russia's most celebrated director. Reviewing her professional filmmaking career, which began in the 1960s, Goldovskaya reveals her passion for creating films that presented a truthful picture of Soviet life, as well as the challenges of working within (and sometimes subverting) the bureaucracies that controlled Russian film and television production and distribution. Along the way, she describes a host of notable figures in Russian film, theater, art, and politics, as well as the technological evolution of filmmaking from film to video to digital media.

A compelling portrait of a woman who broke gender and political barriers, as well as the eventful four decades of Russian history she has documented, Woman with a Movie Camera will be fascinating reading for a wide audience.

Whitt explores the lives of women reporters who achieved significant historical recognition, such as Ida Tarbell and Ida Wells-Barnett. Investigating the often blurry boundary between journalism and literature, she explains how this fluid distinction has actually limited how many scholars perceive the contributions of authors such as Joan Didion and Susan Orlean. Whitt also highlights the work of important novelists, including Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty, to shed light on how their work as journalists informed their highly successful fiction.

This study also offers a survey of contributions women have made to the alternative presses, including the environmental press and civil rights activism. Whitt examines important figures in the early feminist press such as Caroline Churchill, editor and reporter for Denver’s Queen Bee, and Betty Wilkins of Kansas City’s Call. Finally, through newsletters, newspapers, magazines, and journals, she traces the history of the lesbian press and points out the ways in which it indicates that the alternative press is thriving.

This thoughtful, engaging collection examines resilience, identity, and inequality in the modern workplace produced by one of the nation's most observant and incisive writers. 

This collection of warm, heartfelt essays from award-winning novelist Vicki Covington chronicles the multitude of "in between" moments in the writer's life. These are her stolen moments in between the writing of four novels-Gathering Home, Bird of Paradise, Night Ride Home, and The Last Hotel for Women; in between coauthoring the edgy memoir Cleaving: The Story of a Marriage with her husband Dennis Covington; in between raising two daughters; in between her husband's struggle with cancer and the author's own heart attack; in between a life full of trials and triumphs, disappointments and celebrations - moments that, as Covington demonstrates here, are always rich and revealing. 

In the title essay, the author questions why all seven middle-class women who live on her street confess at a neighborhood cookout that in the past 48 hours each of them has cried. In "A Southern Thanksgiving," Covington reflects on the "family dance" that is Thanksgiving in the South: "In the North they put their crazy family members in institutions, but in the South we put them in the living room for everyone to enjoy." In "My Mother's Brain," the author recounts the onset of Alzheimer's in her mother and how, with the spread of the disease, an untapped vein of love is revealed. 

Some of these essays were written as weekly newspaper columns for the Birmingham News. Others were written for specific literary occasions, such as the First Annual Eudora Welty Symposium. They are divided into six thematic sections: "Girls and Women," "Neighborhood," "Death," "The South," "Spiritual Matters," and “Writing.”

Throughout, as Covington casts her candid, attentive eye on a situation, confusion yields to comprehension, fear flourishes into faith, and anger flows into understanding. In memorializing the small moments of her life, she finds that they are far from peripheral; indeed, they are central to a life full of value and meaning.

    Women, Autobiography, Theory is the first comprehensive guide to the burgeoning field of women’s autobiography, drawing into one volume the most significant theoretical discussions on women’s life writing of the last two decades. 
    The authoritative introduction by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson surveys writing about women’s lives from the women’s movement of the late 1960s to the present. It also relates theoretical positions in women’s autobiography studies to postmodern, poststructuralist, postcolonial, and feminist analyses.
    The essays from thirty-nine prominent critics and writers include many considered classics in this field. They explore narratives across the centuries and from around the globe, including testimonios, diaries, memoirs, letters, trauma accounts, prison narratives, coming-out stories, coming-of-age stories, and spiritual autobiographies. A list of more than two hundred women’s autobiographies and a comprehensive bibliography of critical scholarship in women’s autobiography provide invaluable information for scholars, teachers, and readers.

As mass media burgeoned in the years between the first and second world wars, so did another phenomenon—celebrity. Beginning in Hollywood with the studio-orchestrated transformation of uncredited actors into brand-name stars, celebrity also spread to writers, whose personal appearances and private lives came to fascinate readers as much as their work. Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars profiles seven American, Canadian, and British women writers—Dorothy Parker, Anita Loos, Mae West, L. M. Montgomery, Margaret Kennedy, Stella Gibbons, and E. M. Delafield—who achieved literary celebrity in the 1920s and 1930s and whose work remains popular even today.

Faye Hammill investigates how the fame and commercial success of these writers—as well as their gender—affected the literary reception of their work. She explores how women writers sought to fashion their own celebrity images through various kinds of public performance and how the media appropriated these writers for particular cultural discourses. She also reassesses the relationship between celebrity culture and literary culture, demonstrating how the commercial success of these writers caused literary elites to denigrate their writing as "middlebrow," despite the fact that their work often challenged middle-class ideals of marriage, home, and family and complicated class categories and lines of social discrimination.

The first comparative study of North American and British literary celebrity, Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between the Wars offers a nuanced appreciation of the middlebrow in relation to modernism and popular culture.

Based on interviews with seventy women refugees, Women, Violence and War is a book about war as it is seen, lived and interpreted by women who were citizens of the former Yugoslavia.

Many of the accounts portray the horrific experiences the victims had to face and the book addresses issues of sexual, physical and psychological violence, as well as problems of confinement, upheaval and family separation. In a completely new insight the book dispels the myth that many of the women were peasants, and shows that in fact they were educated, middle-class women with independent careers. The study also depicts how some of the victims attempt to come to terms with the aftermath of wartime abuse.

This probing, accurate and unique investigation of victimization is an unparalleled volume that presents a completely new perspective maintaining that violence against women in war is not independent of peace-time victimization and the imbalance of power between sexes.

In Word Warrior, award-winning radio producer Sonja D. Williams draws on archives and hard-to-access family records, as well as interviews with family and colleagues like Studs Terkel and Toni Morrison, to illuminate Durham's astounding career. Durham paved the way for black journalists as a dramatist and a star investigative reporter and editor for the pioneering black newspapers the Chicago Defender and Muhammed Speaks. Talented and versatile, he also created the acclaimed radio series Destination Freedom and Here Comes Tomorrow and wrote for popular radio fare like The Lone Ranger. Incredibly, his energies extended still further--to community and labor organizing, advising Chicago mayoral hopeful Harold Washington, and mentoring generations of activists.

Incisive and in-depth, Word Warrior tells the story of a tireless champion of African American freedom, equality, and justice during an epoch that forever changed a nation.

A Grammy and Tony Award–winning conductor, John DeMain has been a fixture of Madison, Wisconsin, for more than three decades, serving as music director of the Madison Symphony Orchestra and artistic director of the Madison Opera. Before and since then, he has been an internationally recognized conductor, equally at home in the worlds of classical music, opera, and Broadway.

In Working with My Heroes, written with the late Greg Hettmansberger, DeMain recounts incredible experiences—from his days studying piano in Youngstown, Ohio, to his years as an undergraduate and graduate student at Julliard, to his early jobs in summer stock productions, to numerous acclaimed productions—without ever losing sight of the wonder and awe he felt as a young musician first learning his way in the world. With warmth and humor, he provides valuable insight into the business of music making, while also sharing behind-the-scenes stories of entertaining situations he found himself in throughout the years—from playing piano at a gangster’s wedding to an unexpected dressing room encounter with a Broadway star to conducting an opera with circus elephants.

DeMain has had many career-defining moments behind the podium, conducting world premieres of Leonard Bernstein’s A Quiet Place, John Adams’s Nixon in China, and Jeanine Tesoro’s Blue, as well as the U.S. premiere of Philip Glass’s Akhnaten, among others. He guest-conducted symphonies and operas in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. DeMain cemented his reputation with the 1976 Houston Grand Opera performances of George and Ira Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, establishing its stature as a quintessentially American opera. The singers, musicians, and composers DeMain has worked with over the past six decades are a veritable Who’s Who of American classical music. This memoir places readers by his side, allowing them to experience all the wonders and joy of a life spent making music.

In late 1942, along with so many others who signed up to support the war effort, thirty-year-old Mildred Radawiec left a comfortable position as a nurse at the University of Michigan Hospital and postponed her marriage to a soon-to-be doctor to volunteer as a surgical nurse in the major battle theaters of the war. Radawiec was one of thirty volunteers from the hospital surgical staff that comprised the University of Michigan Unit, the 298th General Hospital, as the University of Michigan Hospital was called.

Radawiec's first-person history recounts her wartime experience with sharp detail and grace and sets the stage for a you-are-there experience---from the thrill of signing up and shipping out; to the harrowing ocean crossing and the arduous trip through the Sahara; to dangerous air raids and moving at a moment's notice, often at night with the lights off to avoid attacks. Radawiec was near Omaha Beach in France soon after D-Day, June 6, 1944, and details stories of marathon stints assisting the injured on the front lines as they poured in by the hundreds. Radawiec also traveled to Belgium and Germany and set up in the area near Aachen in the fall of 1944. In Germany she experienced Buzz Bombs---pilotless flying bombs---and even witnessed the death of a fellow nurse in a bombing attack in which medics brought in wounded soldiers by the truckload. Radawiec also leavens her story with uplifting tales of heroism and courage and intersperses the narrative with poignant letters from her family and fiancé.

This stirring personal account of war will mesmerize anyone interested in World War II history and women's too-often-overlooked role in it.

World War II and Nevada is an in-depth examination of the state’s role in the war. Nevada’s geographic location, land, sky, mineral resources, and the sacrifices of its people were crucial to victory—and transformed the state. The war brought the first significant development of the gaming industry; the introduction of a huge, permanent military presence; the diversification of its population; and a shift in political and economic power within the region.

Nevada’s previously unexamined role in the internment of Japanese Americans is explored, and so too is the role of women and minority groups in support of the war. The book concludes with a comprehensive list of those killed, wounded, or made prisoners of war during the conflict.

Weller provides the most thorough analysis of Nevada’s war effort to date and historians will find the book a valuable addition to their World War II history collections. 

This gripping account raises questions for healers, survivors, and readers striving to understand the reality of war and the aftermath of terror. Is it possible to find meaning after enduring crimes against humanity? Can people heal after trauma?

Human rights journalist Julia Lieblich takes the reader through Boskailo's early years under Tito to the wars when friends turned on friends. She documents his harrowing experiences in the camps, where the men he once joined for coffee murder his best friend from childhood.

But the story does not end there. Boskailo moves to the United States and decides to become a psychiatrist so he can guide survivors through the long-term process of restoring hope. Today, inspired by the late psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, Boskailo uses his own experience to help patients mourn their losses and find meaning in the aftermath of terror.

Like its predecessor, Writing Mormon History, this book delves into the captivating narratives of multiple historians as they unfold the backstories of their various publishing endeavors. The authors detail their journeys in crafting influential books, articles, newspaper pieces, and anthologies that have significantly shaped our comprehension of Mormon history. Beyond the polished final products that readers typically encounter, the book explores the driving forces compelling authors to explore their topics and the sacrifices they make along the way.

The volume invites readers to ponder the motivations that fuel an author’s commitment to rigorous research and writing, and sheds light on the substantial time, ranging from minutes to long hours, invested in the sources they cite. Through these narratives, readers gain an appreciation for the dedication and passion that goes into the making of historical scholarship.

Whether you're an avid historian, a student of history, a scholar, or an aspiring author, Writing Mormon History 2 offers an important glimpse into the minds of these writers. This anthology provides a unique opportunity to connect with the human stories behind the academic works that have left an indelible mark on our understanding of Mormon history.

Frances E. Willard's powerful leadership of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) made her one of the most commanding figures in the reform movements of the nineteenth century. World renowned and a force to be reckoned with, Willard grappled publicly and private with difficult issues, including temperance, slavery, women's rights, and her own sexuality. These selections from her forty-nine-volume journal reveal the private and confidential side of Willard for the first time. She comes to life in these pages--a person of character, passion, and self-determination who came to represent the woman of the dawning era. 

Supplemented by an in-depth introduction and generous annotations, Writing Out My Heart sheds new light on an extraordinary individual and the lives of women in nineteenth-century America.