Marge Piercy (www.margepiercy.com) is the author of seventeen novels, most recently Sex Wars; seventeen volumes of poetry, most recently The Crooked Inheritance; a memoir Sleeping with Cats; two nonfiction books; and a CD of her political poems, Louder, We Can’t Hear You Yet. She has been an activist most of her life. She wrote this poem ten days after Howard Zinn’s death, January 27, 2010, and read it at Zinn’s memorial, April 3. | more…
Adrienne Rich is the author of more than sixteen volumes of poetry and five nonfiction prose books, the most recent being A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society (Norton). She is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including a MacArthur Fellowship and the 1999 Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. | more…
Denise Bergman is the author of Seeing Annie Sullivan, poems based on the early life of Helen Keller’s teacher, which was translated into Braille and made into a Talking Book, and Keyhole Poems, a sequence that combines the history of twelve specific urban places with the present. An excerpt of one poem from that series, “Red,” is permanently installed as public art in Cambridge, MA. | more…
Adrienne Rich is the author of more than sixteen volumes of poetry and five nonfiction prose books, the most recent being A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society (Norton). She is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including a MacArthur Fellowship and the 1999 Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. | more…
Marge Piercy is the author of Pesach for the Rest of Us: Making the Passover Seder Your Own (Schocken, 2007). Her most recent novel is Sex Wars: A Novel of the Turbulent Post-Civil War Period (New York: William Morrow, 2005) and her newest book of poetry is The Crooked Inheritance (Knopf, 2006). | more…
Nancy Morejón’s mother was a tobacco worker; her father worked on the Havana docks and was a merchant seaman. She is a direct beneficiary of the Cuban revolution, holding a degree in French literature from the University of Havana. The author of twelve volumes of poetry and numerous books and articles on Cuban and Caribbean culture, she has also been director of the Caribbean Studies Center at Casa de las Americas, the premier Latin American cultural institution. Morejón’s work has been translated into many languages, including, in English, Looking Within (Wayne State University Press, 2003) and With Eyes and Soul, with photographs by Milton Rogovin (White Pine Press, 2004, www.whitepine.org) from which this poem is reprinted. Copyright © 2004 by Nancy Morejón; Translation copyright © 2004 by David Frye. Used by permission. | more…
Denise Bergman is the author of Seeing Annie Sullivan, poems based on the early life of Helen Keller’s teacher (2005), which was translated into Braille and made into a Talking Book. Her poems have been widely published. She conceived and edited City River of Voices, an anthology of urban poetry, and she was the author of Keyhole Poems, a sequence that combines the history of twelve specific urban places with the present. An excerpt of her poem “Red” is permanently installed as public art in Cambridge, Massachusetts | more…
Marge Piercy is the author of Pesach for the Rest of Us: Making the Passover Seder Your Own (Schocken, 2007). Her most recent novel is Sex Wars: A Novel of the Turbulent Post-Civil War Period (New York: William Morrow, 2005) and her newest book of poetry is The Crooked Inheritance (Knopf, 2006) | more…
Adrienne Rich’s most recent book is Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004–2006. A selection of her essays, Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations, appeared in 2003. She edited Muriel Rukeyser’s Selected Poems for the Library of America. She is a recipient of the National Book Foundation’s 2006 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, among other awards. | more…
Marge Piercy is the author of Pesach for the Rest of Us: Making the Passover Seder Your Own (Schocken, 2007). Her most recent novel is Sex Wars: A Novel of the Turbulent Post-Civil War Period (New York: William Morrow, 2005), and her newest book of poetry is The Crooked Inheritance (Knopf, 2006). | more…
Important bloated men squat on the facts
thinking they can hide them with their weight:
men who think their power like King Canute
ordering the sea to behave, can abolish
the eons slow inexorable rise of mountains,
the branching and dying of species, wind
and water that will grind the Himalayas to dust | more…
Fires crackle in the brittle trees
bled dry by drought, the grass,
bleached straw on the dusty hills
where rain no longer falls
in what used to be its season | more…
Margot Pepper And Her 2005 Second Grade Class At Rosa Parks Elementary School In Berkeley, California | more…