Bell Hooks: Feminism, Patriarchal Leader and Perspective of Mainstream Media, Bell Hooks has written more than 30 books on the subject of the intersectionality of feminism, racism, and class. Gloria Jean Watkins 1952-2021. Began her academic career in 1976 teaching English and Ethnic Studies, at USC soon after Bell Hooks worked at Yale, Stanford, and Berea College in Kentucky before joining "Bell Hooks Institution" was founded, her pen name was taken from Gloria's paternal great-grandmother Bell Blair Hooks. Vintage Stationary Stickers for Journaling
Emily Bronte: Watcher of the Moon, Fantasy, and Cruel Romance, Reclusive British Novelist 1818-1848. Emily Bronte is best known for writing the famous "Wuthering Heights" a vicious novel of romance between two isolated, stormy characters- Catherine and Heathcliff. Assuming the inspiration may have come from taking walks in the hills and creating a world of fantasy with her sisters living at her family home on the moors. Later she died of tuberculosis.
Octavia Butler: Sower of Strange Seeds, Species, and the Future, Science Fiction Writer 1947-2006. Octavia was a pioneer in the very white and male-dominated genre of science fiction. Octavia received a MacArthur "Genius" Grant for her dark, philosophical novels and stories, which feature black female protagonists and explore power dynamics between sexes, races, and species. She wrote science fiction and later moved to Washington and died of a stroke.
Shirley Jackson: Witch of Villages, Domestic Horrors, and Omen, American Horror Writer 1916-1965. Shirley Jackson's fiction which marries the ordinary with the supernatural, often speaks to the inhumanities people are prone to when given half a chance. Her most famous story on the subject, "The Lottery", was written after rural Vermont residents painted a swastika on her house. (Her husband was Jewish) Her works also include her observations of raising her four kids and she turned them into funny essays.
Eileen Chang: Enchantress of Bitter Love, Treachery, and Jewels, Chinese Literature 1920-1995. Giant of Modern Chinese Literature she was born from a mother who was addicted to opium, yet her mom taught her to ski on bound feet. Her traditional father had a concubine who dismissed her claim of Chang contracting dysentery her father locked her up in a room for six months. She later escaped with the help of a nurse. Chang was famous in Shanghai for her stylish fiction of family betrayal and troubled romance. Chang died as a recluse in Los Angeles, and her work remains popular and beloved. Chang's work has been adapted into films by directors such as Ang Lee. Chang is of famous Literary writer.
Sylvia Plath: Fury of Motherhood, Marriage and the Moon, Iconic Confessional Poet 1932-1963. Born in Boston, Sylvia Plath was a social and academic success despite intense depression and suicide attempts. On a Fullbright scholarship to Cambridge University, she met and married the poet Ted Huges. While Hughes philandered and kept bees. Plath stayed at home with two young children and wrote increasingly brilliant, scary poetry that made use of her anger at her husband and father, intense mental states, and obsessions with death. At 30 years of age, Plath ended her life by placing her head in the oven.
Toni Morrison: Queen of Miracles, Generations, and Memory, Vivic Poetic Language Nobel Winner Novelist, 1931-2019. No literary writer is more honor-laden than Tony Morrison, who was born to a working-class family in Lorain, Ohio - a frequent setting for her epic novels of black experience. Her most famous work, "Beloved", has become required reading, but wave that unjust homework aura away. Seek it for the haunted story it is, a deeply spooky and moving book about a vengeful baby ghost. Women are best known for creativity and originality.
Anna Akhmatova: Koldunya of Winter, Endurance, and Willows, Great Russian Poet 1889-1966. Anna was celebrated during and beyond her lifetime for her lyric melancholy poetry. As Russia fell under Stalin, Akhmatova and her circle of artists and intellectuals were persecuted for their work: her son was imprisoned and sent to labor camps and her husband was executed. Akhmatova's most famous poem, "Requiem", is her boldest attempt at capturing the Stalinist terror.
Joy Harjo: Cosmic Traveler of Crows, Horses, and Survival, Mvskoke Poet and Musician 1951- still living. Harjo, a common Mvskoke (Creek) Nation name means, "so brave she crazy". Joy Harjo courageously survived an oppressive childhood, teenage pregnancy, and domestic abuse before becoming a spiritually charged poet of wild natural imagery and urgent social activism, as well as an award-winning saxophone player and singer.
Flannery O'Connor: Seer of Peacocks, Weird Country People, and Glass Eyes, Southern Gothic Fiction 1925-1964. Flannery O'Connor wrote cutting, hilarious, and (secretly devoutly) Catholic stories about the Deep South. Growing up in Georgia, O'Connor loved chickens and knit coats for her fowl. After graduating from the Iowa Writers Workshop and hitting her stride in fiction, she contracted lupus and moved back in with her mother. She populated their farm with more than forty peacocks. She must have used the bird's feathers I assume.
Sappho: Siren of Lyre, Honey, and Ruins, Lyric Poet of Ancient Greece, Known for love poetry 630-570 BCE.
Forugh Farrookhzad: Rebel of Sensual Love, Green Gardens, and Perfume, Iranian Poet and Filmmaker 1935-1967.
Emily Dickinson: Specter of Windows, Flies, and the Unexpected wrote poetry according to her thoughts and personal vision of life, as she lived her life in isolation. 1830-1866. Emily Dickinson spent her whole life in Amherst Massachusetts. Refusing conventional religion and her prominent family's exhausting social schedule, she instead cultivated a unique spiritual and social life. She wrote long letters to friends, worked in the garden, and created strikingly original poetry about God, death, pain, and love. When Dickinson died, even those closest to her were shocked to find her life's work of eighteen hundred poems neatly folded in a drawer.
Audre Lorde: Warrior of Witch of Otherness, Bodies Electric, and Sisterhood, Poet and Civil Rights Activist 1934-1992. Born in NYC to West Indian parents, Audre Lorde proudly proclaimed herself a black lesbian feminist. As an activist and essayist, she was outspoken about racism, sexism, and homophobia. In addition to these themes, her work is populated with mothers, children, sisters, anger, cancer, the erotic, unicorns, snails eating dead snakes, witches, fire, and the importance of refusing silence, period.
Angela Carter: Fairy Godmother of Bloody Tales, the Circus, and Mirrors, British Author of Fiction and Fairy Tales 1940-1992. Angela Carter's feminist fairy tales, which draw on stories like, "Little Red Riding Hood", and "Beauty and the Beast", are sumptuous tapestries depicting sexual, violent scenes, ornamented with symbols and adjectives. She was fascinated by the performance of feminity, and her works often feature showgirls, trapeze, artists, and dolls.
Virginia Woolf: Guardian of the Waters, the Porcelain, and the Lexicon, Visionary British Modernist 1882-1941. Virgin Woolf helped usher in a major new literary movement with her stream-of-consciousness fiction, which focuses intensely on the experience of awareness and moves fluidly between the inner lives of its characters. Her personal life (childfree, sexually, liberated) and incisive feminist essays were no less radical. After a lifelong struggle with mental illness. Woolf put stones in her pockets and stepped into the river near her Sussex home.
Sandra Cisneros: Hechicera de los Nombres, las Casas, yla, Soledad, Groundbreaking Mexican American Writer 1954- still living. Born in a working-class Chicago neighborhood to a Mexican father and Mexican American mother, Sandra Cisneros navigates the richness and misogyny of both Hispanic and American cultures. She vowed to never marry and to always have a house of her own. Her most famous book, "The House on Mango Street", a coming-of-age novel saturated, with sensory vignettes, is taught in elementary schools, and colleges alike. Sandra's poetry is with passion and asserts healthy sexuality and her masterful short stories.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Soothsayer of Utopias, Creeping, Women and Evil Wallpaper, American PowerHouse of Feminism Socialism and Fiction 1860-1935. Gilman is best known for her "The Yellow Wall - Paper", a story inspired by the disastrous, sexist "rest cure", prescribed for her postpartum depression. In her day, Gilman was also famous as a social critic, giving popular lectures on economic and social reform, and for her unconventional life choices. Her utopian novels and notifications are worth revisiting for their visions of a cooperative society and the place of gender roles in economics.
Jamaica Kincaid: Sorceress of Islands, Venom, and Histories, Antiguan American Writer best known for her writing about mother and daughter relationships 1949- still living. Jamaica Kincaid was born in Antigua, a former slave-owning British colony in the West Indies. Eager to get away, she moved to the United States at eighteen to work as an au pair. Soon after, she began writing New Yorker articles and her intense, biting fiction and non-fiction, which speaks with tremendous authority and clarity and often repeats images and phrases in an insistent invective against the failures of mothers, fathers, siblings, and colonialism.
Leslie Marmon Silko: Laguna Pueblo Novelist 1948-still living her writing was based on her family experiences and the harsh arctic environment, Native American and weaving. Leslie is of Pueblo, Mexican, European, and Cherokee ancestry. Leslie identifies with Laguna Pueblo culture which holds a vital belief in the universe's interconnectedness. Silkos's work explores the tensions between Southwest's diverse communities and methods of healing. Her most famous novel was about a white half from Pueblo trying to recover from WWII, which attracted a spotlight for Native American Literature.
Alejandra Pizarnik: Fantasmaof Silence, Death, and Lilacs, minimalist Argentine poet 1936 1972, Born to Russian Jewish parents in Argentina, Alejandra Pizarnik was educated in both Yiddish and Spanish but wrote in Spanish. Her poetry of imagistic purity and surrealist influence summons themes of silence, absence, madness, and death again and again. Her own struggle with depression led to an intentional overdose of Seconal at the age of thirty -six. Already idolized by Spanish-speaking writers her genius deserves a global readership.
Mirabai: Dakini of Holy Ecstasy, the Dark One, and Ankle Bells, Hindu Mystic and Devotional Love Poet 1450-1547, Instead of attending to her royal and wifely duties, Princess Mirabai wrote intense, erotic devotional poetry to the god Krishna, whom she thought of as her lover. Mirabai's in-laws loathed her unconventional ways, and she miraculously escaped their poisoning attempts twice. When the in-laws tried to bring her back into the family Mirabai spent the night at a Krishna's image that night or continued on her spiritual pilgrimage in disguise.
Anais Nin: Undine of Introspection, Opulent Dreams, and Voyages, Avant-Garde Author of Fiction and Memoir 1903-1977, born to Cuban parents, Anais Nin-sensitive, magnetic, and fashionable, was raised in Europe and New York. As an adult in Paris, she forged a fluid new literature of female consciousness. Much has been made of her erotica, but her chief artistry is in the non-lurid works. Nin's fiction and her erotica, but her chief artistry is in the non-lurid works. Nin's fiction and her masterpiece, a lifelong diary explore the fractured self, her complicated feelings for her father, psychoanalysis, love, and adventures of all sorts.
Gertrude Stern: Madame of Roses, Geometry, and Repetition, American Expatriate and Modernist Innovator 1874-1946, Gertrude Stein's Paris salon was host to a staggering collection of modern art and famous visitors. Influenced by the radical painters she supported, Stein set out to create cubism in writing. She stripped her poems of narrative and logic, playing instead with spatial relationships and processes. She shared her life with her romantic partner and secretary, Alice B. Toklas.
Yumiko Kurahashi: Sibyl of Masks, Extraterrestrial Eggs, and Twisted Fantasies, Japanese Surrealists 1935-2005, Yumiko Kurashashi's a badass of experimental fiction from Kochi Prefecture, is almost entirely unknown among English speakers. Influenced by Kafka and French literature, Kurashashi's bizarre stories feature ghosts, flying heads, witch masks, incest, and bestiality. Her work will completely freak you out and provoke you with its fairy-tale logic and philosophical underbelly.
Agatha Christie: Grand Dame of Trickery, Murder, and Teatime, Best Selling British Crime Novelist 1890-1976, Agatha Christie's nearly seventy detective novels made her the most popular novelist in all of history. Taking place in a British aristocracy of luxury trains, handsome estates, and butlers, her books keep the reader guessing about the truth behind their murders until the shocking twists are revealed. I strongly assume this writer was an influence on the television program that was written in the 1980s "Murder She Wrote".
Janet Frame: Hermit of Hospitals, Belongings, and Lost Souls, Idiosyncratic New Zealand Novelist 1924-2004, Janet Fame was born to a large, poor family on a New Zealand farm. Her brother had epilepsy, and two of her sisters drowned in adolescence. Misdiagnosed with schizophrenia. Frame spent most of her twenties in psychiatric wards, receiving two hundred electroshock treatments and narrowly escaping a lobotomy. After her release, she poured a solitary life even wearing earmuffs in the privacy of her own home to block out sound, and writing autobiographical fiction about hospitialization and the displaced self.
Maria Sabina: Shaman of Dew, Hummingbirds, and Mushrooms Language, Mazatec Healer and Oral Poet 1894-1985 Maria Sabina who could not read or write and lived in poverty in the mountains of southern Mexico, is considered the greatest shaman-poet or Wise One (chota chijne) of the Mazatec language. She improvised her chants during psilocybin-mushroom ceremonies, performed to heal the sick. Her rich spiritual vision was informed by native Mazatec beliefs as well as the Catholic faith. She chants and claps with such force.
Mary Shelly: Alchymist of Monsters, Children, the Living and the Dead, British Writer of Frankenstein 1797 - 1851, Frankenstein isn't the garish zombie story we've seen in pop culture. Inspired by scientific discussions of the day and Shelly's complex feelings about parenting, Frankenstein is a painful tale about the creation of life and what happens to shunned, abandoned children. Her life was as harrowing as her famous novel: her great losses of her mother (feminist Mary Wollstonecraft) died during Shelley's birth), her husband (poet Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in a sailing accident), and children (only one of four survived) tried her ideals of domestic harmony.
Zora Neale Hurston: Conjurer of Hurricanes, Zombies, and Tall Tales 1891-1960 Harlem Renaissance star, folklorist anthropologist. Before she would write Hurston would will herself into a trance. When Hurston wasn't writing lush fiction about black women owning themselves, Hurston was collecting folktales around the South and journeying to the Caribbean. There, she initiated into Vodou, once by boiling a live cat and passing its bones over her lips and taking the first known photograph of a zombie. Hurston fell into obscurity even before her death (she was buried in an unmarked grave) but has seen a major revival of interest in recent decades among readers, feminists, and critics as a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance.
