The editors and contributors of the latest volume in the Human Rights Series from Lost Horse Press know what they’re talking about.
They’ve lived it.
In “Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workplace,” 120 female poets from around the world lend their voices and talents to share their workplace experiences — not just pay and promotion inequity or workplace harassment and intimidation, but women’s ever-widening range of occupations and representation in a globalized world.
The collection — which will be the subject of a free group reading performance by Carolyne Wright, Holly Hughes, Lynn Coffin and Mary Ellen Talley at 3 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 28 at Eagle Harbor Book Company in downtown Winslow — also includes a statement from Lilly Ledbetter herself, and blurbs from human-rights poets and activists Carolyn Forché and Cynthia Hogue.
More than three years in the making, this anthology began after President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the editors began calling for women poets of all backgrounds and job descriptions to share their workplace experiences.
“This remarkable anthology, gathered in tribute to Lilly Ledbetter with a toast to Carolyn Kizer, gathers the lyric art of working women, writing from the depths of at least sixty-two occupations,” said Forché.
“These are the poems of the heavy lifters, night shifters, line and piece workers, writing with grace and often with humor. Poets who punch clocks, woman the phones and decks, weave, weld and can, cotton-pick and cold call, thread-spin, typeset and teach. They sex-work, they ship-build, plaster and preach, butcher and drive the bus. This is anthology as page-turner, as fist in the air, as do-it-yourself manual against despair.”
“Raising Lilly Ledbetter” is the third volume in the Human Rights Series of Lost Horse Press; a nonprofit, independent poetry publisher, involved with community outreach and social change through cultural and educational programs. Voices in this anthology bear witness to women’s workspaces and re-envision the world of work for women. How do women tell their workplace stories in poetry, and act as agents of change in these difficult economic times?
Washington-based contributors to this anthology include Kathya Alexander, Lyn Coffin, Laura Da’, Madeline DeFrees (via Anne McDuffie), former Washington State Poet Laureate Kathleen Flenniken, Erin Fristad, Cindy Williams Gutiérrez, Stephanie Barbé Hammer, Jana Harris, Sharon Hashimoto, Holly J. Hughes, Kate Lebo, Colleen McElroy, Kristen McHenry, Lucia Perillo, Judith Roche, Martha Silano, Ana Maria Spagna, Mary Ellen Talley, Eugenia Toledo (co-editor), Gail Tremblay, Deborah Woodard, Carolyne Wright (lead editor) and Sarah Zale.
“When we open ‘Raising Lilly Ledbetter,’ we enter a world that has been, like women’s work and working women historically, silenced or trivialized — or both,” Hogue said. “The poems gathered in ‘Raising Lilly Ledbetter’ counter all that. They break the cultural remainders — reminders — of that silencing by speaking loud and clear. They bear witness to the meaning of women’s lived experiences of work. They are large and contain multitudes. They prove that the stories they memorialize must not only be told, but also excavated, put in conversation with each other, and heard, for without the poetry, the stories will be forgotten, their information and wisdom lost to us. This beautiful anthology, with its marvelous and rich array of poems, performs a great service to us all, and the editors are to be thanked for their hard — and joyous — work and celebrated for their vision.”
Visit www.eagleharborbooks.com to learn more about this and other upcoming author events.
Earlier on Sunday, at 11:30 a.m., the shop will host Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock to discuss her new young adult novel “The Smell of Other People’s Houses.”
In the book, four vivid voices tell intertwining stories of hardship, tragedy and wild luck experienced while growing up in Alaska in the 1970s.
Community reading
What: Group reading of “Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace.”
When: 3 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 28.
Where: Eagle Harbor Book Company (157 Winslow Way East).
Admission: Free.
