C.D. Wright, 2014 To the Lighthouse Finalist Judge
The 2014 To the Lighthouse Finalist Judge is renowned poet and chancellor at the Academy of American Poets, C.D. Wright. C.D. Wright was born in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas, the daughter of a judge and a court reporter. She has published over a dozen books, includingRising, Falling, Hovering(2008); Like Something Flying Backwards: New and Selected Poems (2007); and a text edition of One Big Self: An Investigation(2003), a project...
New Clarissa Dalloway “everything but poetry” Book Prize
A Room of Her Own is pleased to announce the Clarissa Dalloway “everything but poetry” Book Prize. The new prize will award $1,000 and publication to one previously unpublished prose manuscript by a woman writer. Accepted genres will include but are not limited to memoir, biography, novel or novella, young adult literature, and graphic novels. Developed in order to celebrate a variety of voice and style in women’s...
What if Shakespeare had a sister?
In her classic 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf asks: what if Shakespeare had had a sister? She imagines an artist equal to Shakespeare in genius, different from him only in her sex, and wonders what might have become of her. She suspects that such a playwright would have died in obscurity, her poetry unexpressed. In invoking the stunted life and work of that imaginary playwright, Woolf mourns all the countless...
“The Boardwalk, 1969,” by Helen Jones
Well I took my three youngest kids and their friends to Santa Cruz. Bought them sodas at the boardwalk, played in the waves, had a great day. And then shit, the real fun begins. When it’s time to go Alice and I get in a tiff cuz she doesn’t want to leave and finally I say “Fine you can walk home.” Home is twenty miles over the mountains, and damned if that brat doesn’t start walking. I figure she’ll be back soon, tail between her...
“Storm,” by Abby Chew
No one asks for silence this morning but we give it without question. The dawn, long past, brought a haze of heat, laid it down over us heavy, not at all like your body over mine. Not at all like that. Last night, a storm struck us down. I watched lightning crack the side of the barn, wind snap the bean trellis, toss it up, spinning. We salvage what we can. The sky doesn’t ask if we want our arms slick with sweat as we pick...