Tag Archives: City Lights

The Rad American Women Behind Rad American Women: An Interview With Kate Schatz & Miriam Klein Stahl

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Rad American Women A–Zwhich was just released from City Lights/Sister Spit, doesn’t pretend to be an exhaustive list of important American women. But to imagine the 25 women selected by author Kate Schatz and illustrator Miriam Klein Stahl as a representative sample is to imagine a world in which radicalism is somehow the norm, a world in which living as a woman in America might itself be a radical act. From Angela Davis to Zora Neale Hurston, from Dolores Huerta to Kate Bornstein to Maya Lin to Patti Smith to to Temple Grandin to Wilma Mankiller, the book profiles women who came from very different backgrounds and worked in very different fields, but who were all undeniably radical: in their politics, their aesthetics, their style, in the ways in which their work continues to shape and challenge our own lives. Very few, if any, of them are familiar from the Famous American Women books of my childhood. In one of the most moving sections of the book, Schatz and Klein Stahl devote the letter X to The Women Whose Names We Don’t Know, gesturing not only toward public figures who could eventually show up in middle-school social-studies curricula–“the women we haven’t learned about yet”–but toward the ordinary women “whose stories we will never read.”

I got to talk to Schatz and Klein Stahl over email about their collaboration, their own daughters, and about the politics of basically every concept in the title: radicalism, America, nationalism, women, feminism, and the alphabet! Continue reading

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Rah! Rah! Roundup

rahrahroundup“The truth is that we are all changing all the time to each other.” It’s not about the pronouns, the denotations, but about context. In the parable that Nelson names her work for, “all of the parts of the Argo can be changed so every part of the ship is no longer the original ship. And yet it’s still called the Argo, much like our bodies and selves are replacing all the time.” – Ariel Lewiton interviews Maggie Nelson for Guernica‘s “Boundaries of Gender” special issue.

“Reluctant to ‘identify’ themselves by any means or terms, categories such as you and I, top and bottom, sub and Dom, man and woman, student and teacher, straight and queer are played with, turned inside out, discarded in the hope of achieving some kind of mutual recognition in the cracks between.”  – Hestia Peppe critiques Kathy Acker & McKenzie Wark‘s I’m Very Into You over at Full Stop.

“Aardvarks and Zebras are great and all, but Angela Davis and Zora Neale Hurston are just so much better. And that’s exactly the education you get when you pick up Rad American Women A-Z, a new book written by Kate Schatz and illustrated by Miriam Klein Stahl.” – Chantal Strasburger for TeenVogue on “the coolest feminist children’s book.” Continue reading

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