the power of women—they have motivated, stimulated, and encouraged since the first book was written. In fact, a woman may have written the first book! The Book of Awesome Women Writers explores in a compelling manner the fascinating history and work of the world’s most beloved and influential women writers, without whom I never would have been a success.
As a curious and impressionable young girl, I was blessed with a mother who educated me about Black women writers. My mother shared her race records with me (similar to race books), which documented the traditions, achievements, and work of Black writers. I was especially inspired by Phillis Wheatley and Lucy Terry Prince, pioneering African American women and some of the first women writers in America—if not the first.
My mother also took me to see Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun—a pivotal and moving moment in my life which encouraged and nurtured my creativity. The work and courage of this successful woman of color, who shared her message with audiences all over the country (and later, all over the world), became the foundation upon which my creativity was developed.
I was moved in a similar manner while studying at Barnard, where I was introduced to Anna Akhamatova’s Russian poetry and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. I was so taken with To the Lighthouse that it was the subject of my freshman composition; I argued that Woolf was writing about the choices a woman has to make. My professor wrote on my paper that it was about “the choices a person has to make,” but, to me, it was specifically about the ensuing weight and consequences of those decisions. In The Book of Awesome Women Writers, Becca Anderson explores the complex life and work of both these mavens, along with the history and achievements of many other women writers.
In my senior year of college, Caroline Rodgers published a little paperback poetry book that changed my life and influenced my own writing—her stanzas were sculpted in such a way that they flowed like rivers—and that continues to be important to me today. I owe a great deal in terms of lyricism and syntax to Zora Neale Hurston, who along with Sonja Sanchez and June Jordan influenced my personal writing style.
I respected June Jordan, whom I met during college, because upon reading her work I was filled with delight—she tackled public issues through a female voice. That was and still is extremely important to me.
My first experience with writing came about because there were no Black women writing about themselves, the world, and politics—so we had to write it for ourselves. In 1967, my friend Tawani Davis and I approached Barnard for a grant because we noticed there was no published literature by women of color. With the five hundred dollar grant, we designed a magazine called Fat Mama that published drawings, pieces of music, and poetry by women of color. We had our first taste of self-publishing and loved it—we had the opening party at the African American Museum in Harlem.
While in graduate school, I was enchanted by Diana Lakoskey, Anne Petrie, Margaret Randall, and the narratives of Maya Angelou. Around this time, I discovered two works that changed my life, Susan Griffin’s Women and Nature and Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology, both of which I still rely on when I teach feminist literature and aesthetics.
Soon after For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf was published, I encountered incredible hostility. When it opened, I was subject to much animosity from the Black male community, but I did experience the joy of reaching women (eventually reaching women all over the world). I now know that what I went through was worth it, for women globally have had the opportunity to perform For Colored Girls and it’s been true for them—and that is an amazing phenomenon. I’m very grateful and humbled by it.
Today I am lucky enough to be constantly working with Black women writers—we read and critique each other’s work and support each other. I am in a community of writers with the very women who have influenced me the most—Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Maya Angelou. I am truly blessed on this journey.
This book is a testament to the relationship and contributions of women writers, lest we forget their impact and inspiration. Becca paints portraits of women writers with her energetic and enigmatic words in an accessible and engaging manner. Please join me on this amazing journey through women’s history—I know you will be as inspired by it as I have been.
author of the Uppity Women series
With her new book, Becca Anderson has made it not only legitimate but cool to be book-mad. As a woman with a chronic case of bibliomania, I’m delighted to see we’re out of the closet. Of course, it makes me anxious, too; will there be enough books for everybody, if, you know, all those other people become bibliophiles?
As a student of history, I’ve learned that we’re in supremely good company. Ever since there have been books, there have been bookworms. That’s more than four thousand years of voracious reading—and a lot of it accomplished by women. The making of books was a scary new technology: marks made on clay or silk or paper became time capsules of knowledge. They conveyed secrets. They ignored distances. No wonder that, early on, books became sacrosanct in ways we cannot even imagine.
From the earliest times, females honed in on the reading, transcribing, and authoring of books. Take ancient Mesopotamia, for instance. Although it made males quite testy, women occasionally became scribes. In fact, the earliest author we know of in history—male or female—was a priestess and poet named Enheduanna of Ur, whose work dates from 2500 BCE. Only boys were supposed to learn reading and writing. So many women managed to do so, however, that a distinctively female written dialect called emesal came into being.
Books in Mesopotamia were palm-sized or smaller, durable, and portable. They were made of clay and were able to be reused. They sound suspiciously like the smartphones and e-books of today, don’t they?
With literacy came cupidity. Thousands of years ago, women lusted for books—and began to collect them. One of the earliest bibliophiles was—surprise—the world’s most famous sex goddess and political schemer: Cleopatra the Seventh. At Alexandria, the Egyptian queen possessed a world library that was without parallel. A lifelong student of philosophy, she got a voluptuous enjoyment from reading. When Marc Anthony set out to win Cleopatra’s heart, he knew just what to give her: the library at Pergamum in Asia Minor—the second most wondrous in the world. (It was, however, a nightmare to gift wrap.)
A few hundred years later, highly educated Roman women took part in one of Christianity’s great literacy projects. Women like Paula and her daughter Eustochium spent thirty-five years translating the Bible into Greek and Latin under the direction of early Christian writer and glory-hound Jerome, who took all subsequent credit for the work of his corps of skilled female readers and translators.
On the other side of the globe, Asian women had been hip-deep in bibliomania since the eighth century, when a bright Japanese empress named Koken ordered up a print run of one million copies of religious verse—Asia’s first block printing project.
From the eleventh through thirteenth centuries, a golden age of reading and writing bloomed among Japanese literati with women at its forefront. The hands-down superstar of the age was Murasaki Shikibu, whose psychological novel, The Tale of Genji, is now considered the world’s first “modern” novel. As in Mesopotamia, the number of women involved in reading and writing reached such a critical mass that the phonetic Japanese writing system called hiragana came to be called “woman’s hand.”
In medieval times, nuns fought to save the collected wisdom of the world in permanent form. Although literacy took a nosedive among Europeans, here and there women still managed to read, write, and collect books; Eleanor of Aquitaine, for instance, and Heloise, the nun whose hots for Abelard overshadowed her love for books. There were lesser lights we haven’t
