Telling Our Stories, Shaping Our World: Books to Celebrate Women Storytellers

by Zora Neale Hurston

First published in 1942 at the crest of her popularity as a writer, this is Zora Neale Hurston's imaginative and exuberant account of her rise from childhood poverty in the rural South to a prominent place among the leading artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance.

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by Gillian Gill

How did Adeline Virginia Stephen become the great writer Virginia Woolf? Acclaimed biographer Gillian Gill tells the stories of the women whose legacies—of strength, style, and creativity—shaped Woolf’s path to the radical writing that inspires so many today.

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by Sandra Cisneros

A book of essays spanning the author's career and reflecting upon the various homes she's lived in around the world from the Chicago neighborhoods where she grew up to her abode in Mexico, in a region where "my ancestors lived for centuries, these poignant, unforgettable pieces give us not only her most transformative memories but also a revelation of her artistic and intellectual influences.

World languages: Español
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by Graham Hodges

Anna May Wong was the best-known Chinese American actress during Hollywood’s golden age and starred in over fifty movies between 1919 and 1960 including The Thief of Baghdad, Old San Francisco, and Shanghai Express. In a narrative that recalls both the gritty life in Los Angeles’ working-class Chinese neighborhoods and the glamor of Hollywood at its peak, Graham Hodges recounts the life of this elegant, beautiful, and underappreciated screen legend.

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by Annie Ernaux; translated by Alison L. Strayer

The author describes her life in France from 1941 to 2006, mixing personal history and memory with descriptions of the popular culture of each decade.

World languages: Français | 中文 
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by Paula J. Giddings

Traces the life and legacy of the nineteenth-century activist and pioneer, documenting her birth into slavery, her career as a journalist and a pioneer for civil rights and suffrage, and her determination to counter lynching.

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin took readers to imaginary worlds for decades. In her last great frontier of life, old age, she explored a new literary territory: the blog, a forum where she shined. The collected best of Ursula’s blog, No Time to Spare presents perfectly crystallized dispatches on what mattered to her late in life, her concerns with the world, and her wonder at it: “How rich we are in knowledge, and in all that lies around us yet to learn. Billionaires, all of us.”

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by Amy Tan

Presents a memoir on the author's life as a writer that explores formative experiences from her childhood and her evolving perspectives on the symbiotic relationship between fiction and emotional memory.

World languages: 中文
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by Joy Harjo

Three-term poet laureate Joy Harjo offers a vivid, lyrical, and inspiring call for love and justice in this contemplation of her trailblazing life.

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by Isabel Allende; translated by Margaret Sayers Peden

Allende bares her soul while sharing her thoughts on love, marriage, motherhood, spirituality and religion, infidelity, addiction, and memory—and recounts stories of the wildly eccentric, strong-minded, and eclectic tribe she gathers around her and lovingly embraces as a new kind of family.

World languages: Español
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edited by Anna von Planta

Relegated to the genre of mystery during her lifetime, Patricia Highsmith is now recognized as one of “our greatest modernist writers.” Meticulously culled by her devoted editor from over 8,000 pages of diaries and notebooks, these pages help reveal the inscrutable figure behind the legendary pen. This volume exhibits precisely how Highsmith’s personal affairs seeped into her fiction—and the sheer darkness of her own imagination.

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by Maxine Hong Kingston

A first-generation Chinese-American woman recounts growing up in America within a tradition-bound Chinese family, and confronted with Chinese ghosts from the past and non-Chinese ghosts of the present.

World languages: 中文
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edited by Valerie Boyd

For the first time, the edited journals of Alice Walker are gathered together to reflect the complex, passionate, talented, and acclaimed Pulitzer Prize winner of The Color Purple. She intimately explores her thoughts and feelings as a woman, a writer, an African-American, a wife, a daughter, a mother, a lover, a sister, a friend, a citizen of the world.

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by Claudia Tate

Through candid interviews with Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alexis Deveaux, Nikki Giovanni, Kristin Hunter, Gayl Jones, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Tillie Olson, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, Alice Walker, Margret Walker, and Shirley Anne Williams, the book highlights the practices and critical linkages between the work and lived experiences of Black women writers whose work laid the foundation for many who have come after.

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by Lisa Napoli

Tells the story of four pioneering women—Susan Stamberg, Cokie Roberts, Nina Totenberg, and Linda Wertheimer—whose work fighting the male chauvinism of 1970s journalism helped defined the character and voice of National Public Radio.

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by Joy Press

Female writers, directors, and producers have radically transformed the television industry in recent years. Shonda Rhimes, Lena Dunham, Tina Fey, Amy Schumer, Mindy Kaling: These extraordinary women have shaken up the entertainment landscape, making it look like an equal opportunity dream factory. But things weren't always this rosy. It took decades of determination in the face of preconceived ideas and outright prejudice to reach this new era. In Stealing the Show, veteran journalist Joy Press tells the story of the maverick women who broke through the barricades first.

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by Boris Friedewald

This thorough and accessible introduction to the greatest women photographers from the 19th century to today features the most important works of 55 artists, along with in-depth biographical and critical assessments. Each artist is profiled in spreads featuring splendid reproductions of key works and an in-depth overview of her career and contributions to the art of photography. Biographical information and a contextual essay focusing on the impact of women in the history of the medium makes this an excellent illustrated reference.

by Marcellas Reynolds

Supreme Actresses remembers and celebrates the groundbreaking women who have been influencing culture for decades, reshaping the very standards of beauty in modern society. From Hattie McDaniel, the first actress of color to win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1939, to Dorothy Dandridge, the first actress of color to be nominated for Best Actress at the Academy Awards in 1954. And from Ethel Waters, the first African American actress to be featured on an American sitcom in 1950, to Cicely Tyson, the first African American star of a TV drama in 1963.