by Shannon K. Winston I write To shout To live You write To shout To live But who will silence The shouting between us? -Habiba Muhammadi, trans. Ibrahim Muhawi Habiba Muhammadi was born in Algeria and attended the University of Algiers where she studied philosophy. She then moved to Egypt where she earned a degree [...]

by Zinta Aistars Words splash at my feet, the voice of my blood talks, whispers and fills the chambers. Glittering river. Here, I am. ~ from the poem, “Language,” by M. Zalite What we are denied, we often learn to treasure most. Of those basics that a human being needs to live life well, surely [...]

by Zinta Aistars Several Latvian women writers stand out as offering insight into the earliest seeds of feminism—Latvian style, if you will—or, simply, what it meant, and means, to be a woman with a voice. Few, if any, are better known than Aspazija. It was only in the latter part of the 19th century that [...]

Anna Brigadere (1861-1933) “Only he who feels responsibility can be both servant and ruler.” by Zinta Aistars Raised by Latvian parents who were World War II immigrants from Soviet-occupied Latvia, I was born in the United States, but thought of myself first and foremost as Latvian. Latvian, after all, was my first language, the only [...]

by Shannon K. Winston Biancamaria Frabotta is one of the most politically engaged poets in Italy today. She has been at the forefront of the woman’s movement in Italy and, as previously mentioned, she has written extensively about the polemics surrounding the category of an exclusively “women’s literature.” In the 1980s, she was the editor [...]

by Shannon K. Winston Alda Merini, born in Milan in 1931, published her first poetry collection, La presenza di Orfeo, when she was only twenty-two. By and large, her poetry is characterized by a deep ambiguity. While her early poems are filled with hope and love, her later collections, especially Tu sei Pietro (1962), exhibit [...]

by Shannon K. Winston Antonella Anedda, one of today’s most prominent and promising Italian women poets, once called poetry her “reality.” In that same interview with Niederngasse in 2006, she explains that poetry is “the way [she has of] opening [herself] to the world, with verses, with rhythms that [she has] in [her] head and [...]