Learn about five little-known women in history who made big contributions to our modern world, from Yosano Akiko to Rosalind Franklin.

Learn about five little-known women in history who made big contributions to our modern world, from Yosano Akiko to Rosalind Franklin.
Multi-disciplinary artist Erna Rosenstein became a leading cultural voice in 20th century Poland through her surrealist masterpieces.
Anna Akhmatova is one of Russia’s most revered poets. Her work often criticized Stalin’s Russia by lending a voice to victims of the regime.
The poet Anne Sexton’s career was a direct result of her struggles with madness.
A poet and novelist, Sylvia Plath’s career was plagued by depression and mania.
A master of precise language, Grace Paley was an author and poet known for incorporating the daily lives of New York women into her short stories and novels.
Emily Wallis Hughes is a California-born poet currently pursuing an MFA at New York University, where she is a Writers in the Public Schools Fellow. Her poems have been published in Gigantic Magazine and Sacramento News & Review, and anthologized in Burning the Little Candle (Ad Lumen Press).
Writer Mary Ruefle doesn’t own a computer. Her website (obviously managed by someone else) suggests that in order to contact her you should run into someone she knows personally on the street. Well, I emailed someone she knows personally. Then I sat down to my typewriter and typed her a letter, which she answered (also with a typewriter, and with better margins). And so our conversation began.
Melissa Ahart, a Brooklyn-based poet, shares her experiences bringing poems of birth, motherhood, and postpartum depression to the MFA workshop table.
A WOMEN’S THING © 2023