Reflections: Women, War, and Suffering by Holly Wong Art has always been my voice of resistance, my way of making a contribution as a world citizen. In its best moment, art allows us to be more humane and fully aware, and it is the ability to imagine another’s experience of pain that is the first [...]
Vicky Brand
Letting Go, Moving On by Vicky Brand Growing up in our small town in Cheshire, I enjoyed an interesting life as the eldest of three sisters whose parents worked hard at a business making cardboard boxes for the catering trade. From an early age I loved to draw. I remember one picture in particular because [...]
Zaatar Days, Henna Nights by Maliha Masood
Seal Press, February 2007 Review by Misty K. Ericson Feeling trapped in the daily grind of her Seattle tech job, twenty-eight-year-old Maliha Masood set out abroad to ease her restless spirit; but after several months traveling through Europe, she finds herself drawn to a place she never imagined going: the Middle East. The story of [...]
Bento Box in the Heartland: My Japanese Girlhood in Whitebread America by Linda Furiya
Seal Press, January 2007 Review by Misty K. Ericson When Linda opens her lunchbox to find that her mother has packed homemade rice balls rather than the more popular sandwich like her friends have, she is horrified. After all, she is trying desperately to fit in. But as part of the only Japanese family in [...]
The Crowded Bed by Mary Cavanagh
Transita, United Kingdom January 2007 Review by Elizabeth Crachiolo “Good evening, dear friend. I’m extremely pleased to see you, but I’m sure you’ll understand why I can’t give you my full attention. Joe Fortune is just about to kill his father-in-law, and I’ve no intention of missing this long awaited event”: this is how The [...]
Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years with a Midwife in Mali by Kris Holloway
Waveland Press, 2006 Review by Elizabeth Crachiolo This book resists categorization: it is not purely a memoir, an ethnography of childbirth in West Africa, an account of one Malian woman’s life, or a love story. It’s all of these things, and it’s also informative, poignant, and funny. Kris Holloway spends two years in the Peace [...]
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
HarperPerennial. New York, 1988 Review by Lauren Westerfield “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby,” writes Sylvia Plath in her novel of madness, “the world itself is a bad dream.” This angsty work, despite its soul searching, is much more than a simple coming of age tale: modern [...]
Erzulie’s Skirt by by Ana-Maurine Lara
Redbone Press, October 2006 Review by Elizabeth Crachiolo “La Mar had always been there. She knew from dreams that it was from there that she had arisen. That sometime long ago she had entered her waters and emerged on this side, whole and broken. That somewhere in her depths was the key to her death [...]
Linda Vallejo
Nature Exposed by Diane Leon Ferdico “I always believed that I was a ‘person of the world’” says artist Linda Vallejo, who began painting at the age of four. Born in Los Angeles in 1951, her family moved often throughout her formative years, allowing her sense of self and cultural identity to be informed by [...]
