March 8 is International Women’s Day which is intended to celebrate women’s achievements be they social, economic, political, or cultural. At Make a Way Media, we love books so we wanted to take this opportunity to talk a little bit about some amazing female authors.
Did you know there was a time when women weren’t considered legitimate authors? If they were able to be published at all, it was under male pseudonyms! Thankfully, times have changed, and we now recognize and respect the important contributions women make to literature.
Zora Neale Hurston was an author but also an important anthropologist who documented the lives and culture of Black people in the rural south. Best known for Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston was an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance.
Toni Morrison was a Nobel Prize-winning author who was a professor at Princeton University. Her novels spanned decades and include The Bluest Eye and Sula.
Louis Erdrich is a Native American writer whose work has won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. Her books, including The Round House and The Sentence, have long introduced the experiences of Native American characters to a wider audience.
Elizabeth Acevedo is a young writer whose books of poetry have launched a renewed love affair with stories told in verse. She has a new book coming out in 2023 titled Family Lore.
Not every awesome female author is on the national stage (yet), but that doesn’t mean they aren’t creating some fabulous stories.
Erin Keane is editor in-chief at Salon.com and recently published a book of essays about her mother’s unusual childhood called Runaway: Notes on the Myths That Made Me.
Angela Jackson-Brown is a professor at Ball State University and the author of several novels in the same fictional universe. Her most recent is The Light Always Breaks.
Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle is a teacher in North Carolina who is the author of Even As We Breathe which received the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award in 2021.
And, of course, we have to mention Deedee Cummings, founder of Make a Way Media, who writes about hope and empathy and has created a young, but fierce female protagonist in her Modern-Day K series of books about a young girl who pursues her dreams.
How will you celebrate your favorite female authors?