Abby E. Murray: “As a military spouse who writes to cope with war and the army lifestyle, it seems impossible not to be a feminist poet. When my daughter was born, I read A Room of One’s Own to her, aloud, before any other book, because it is the closest we will get to a room of our own. If that doesn’t make me a feminist I don’t know what the hell does.” (website)
Amy Miller: “I’ve been turned down for jobs because I was a woman. I’ve been sexually harassed at work and on the street. Men have exposed themselves to me in parking lots, public parks, and my own driveway. I’ve been in relationships where I was expected to cook because I was the only person in the house with ovaries. I’ve cut hikes short because the trail got too desolate; I walk with pepper spray in supposedly safe neighborhoods. And none of this is uncommon—ask any woman. I don’t know how you can be alive in the world today and not be a feminist.” (website)
Sandra Kohler: “I am 75 years old, and I’ve been writing poems for about 65 of those years. I have written about women’s experiences as female bodies, as lovers, wives, mothers, grandmothers, about their private world; I have written about the public world I live in from what seems to me an inevitably feminist perspective. My earliest poems came out of family life, out of painful experiences of loss, drawing on my emotional life; as my life and work has unfolded I have tried to include a wider world and a wider self in my work. Recently I have found my two grandchildren muses for another kind of poem about personal life.”
Kelsey Hagarman: “When I was twelve, my sister and I went on a walk around our neighborhood. A man followed us. Every time I looked into the glass windows of storefronts, his reflection trailed ours. We ran and didn’t stop until we locked our front door. Besides the fear, I remember the wonder that I wasn’t even wearing makeup. As a feminist, I write against gender expectations, to make sense of memories, for myself and any reader who wants to understand the fear and self-loathing of girlhood.”
Beth Gylys: “I began to self-identify as a feminist while an undergraduate during the ’80s when I took several courses, which would now have been labeled ‘Women’s Studies’ courses. The women faculty I was drawn to and who taught those classes were first-wave feminists and they (the women and the courses) had a tremendous impact on me. I read Erica Jong, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Anne Sexton, and Adrienne Rich. Even before that, though, I had a feminist sensibility. While raising four children, my mother pursued a master’s degree and worked full time. She shaped my belief that women should not be defined only by their relationships. I write about any number of subjects, and I hope as a feminist, my poetry complicates my/our understanding of women.”
Alexis Pauline Gumbs: “I am a queer black troublemaker and a black feminist love evangelist in Durham, North Carolina. My poetry follows the tradition of the black feminist poets whom I research and study. This set of poems is inspired by Toni Morrison, June Jordan, Marlene Nourbese Philip and many more.” (website)
Julie R. Enszer: “I am the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion. I am the rage of all queers, homos, dykes, and fags condensed to the point of explosion. I have the words of that rage caught inside me. Waiting to burst forth from my fingers, from my pen, from my computer. Can you hear it? Can you hear them? Can you hear me? My poetic: going to the root, researching the meaning, ensuring that the word evokes and invokes exactly what I am seeking, exactly what I believe, exactly what I want to say. I am responsible for writing only one life. I am responsible for telling only one truth. My own, but within writing my life and telling my truth burns the entire past, present and future of a thousand communities whose stories made mine, whose values shaped me, whose triumphs, fears, opportunities and challenges are my own. I only have to tell one truth. My own, but that truth is shaped, refracted, reinterpreted, realigned, and reunderstood everyday by the truths of others as I learn them and hear them. I want to capture them all, singular and multiplicitous. One truth with many truths.” (website)
