Celebrate Women's History Month with These Rhody Reads

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Here’s to the ladies who write! March is Women’s History Month so we’re focusing our six selections on books written by local female authors. From poetry about identity to an insider’s view of the pageant industry, these authors examine a wide range of issues that affect us all, regardless of gender identity. 

Exploring female identities is a key theme throughout Mary-Kim Arnold’s debut poetry collection, The Fish and the Dove. “American Childhood,” for example, follows the narrator’s journey from girlhood through womanhood, constructing a herstory through memory. Arnold’s unique voice emphasizes the importance of sharing our own stories while reflecting on the way they are told. Arnold teaches at Brown and The Newport MFA at Salve Regina University.

Rhode Island Writers Colony fellow Sasha Banks turns white supremacy on its head in her collection of poetry, america, MINE. With a poignant mix of magical realism and rage, Banks pictures a future where racism no longer struggles to thrive. Her thrilling language makes the case for a world that may or may not be the best hope for us all.

Adoption was one of the few realistic options for unmarried young women until the early 1970s. Author and RISD professor Ann Fessler explores the consequences of this decision in The Girls Who Went Away: Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.  Fessler, herself an adoptee, shares stories about the overlooked history of single women prior to the landmark Supreme Court decision.

“It’s an honor just to be nominated.” But there’s much more to the beauty pageant, an institution that has had a distinct impact on feminist politics in America for more than a century. In her book, Here She Is: The Complicated Reign of the Beauty Pageant in America, Brown University professor Hilary Levey Friedman takes us beyond the glitz and glamor to illustrate how the pageant industry empowers women to raise their voices to express themselves and advocate for change.

Historian Marta Martinez has spent years collecting oral histories detailing the influence of Latin American immigrants on Rhode Island’s socioeconomic development. In Latino History in Rhode Island: Nuestras Raíces, Martinez shares the words of individuals and families who came to America from many different places for a fresh start and helped build a vibrant, robust community.

Get to know some of the wild women from our state’s past with M.E. Reilly-McGreen’s Witches, Wenches & Wild Women of Rhode Island. The Wakefield writer explores the truth behind legends like Exeter’s suspected vampire Mercy Brown and original Portsmouth settler Anne Hutchinson, plus more obscure characters including the Mad Mama of Block Island and reclusive painter Beatrice Turner.

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