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RAISING LILLY LEDBETTER: WOMEN POETS OCCUPY THE WORKSPACE

RAISING LILLY LEDBETTER: WOMEN POETS OCCUPY THE WORKSPACE

$21.00Price

ISBN: 978-0-9911465-9-8

Pub Date: Spring 2015

Pages: 264


Carolyne Wright, M.L. Lyons, and Eugenia Toledo, editors


In January 2009, after President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law, his first legislative act after taking office, poets Carolyne Wright and Eugenia Toledo began to think about the need to hear more from women about their workplace experiences—not just pay and promotion inequity, or workplace harassment and intimidation, but all matters relevant to women and work in an increasingly globalized world, including the ever-widening range of occupations in which women are engaged, and their joy and satisfaction of work well done.


Six years after the signing of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, however, women’s pay has continued to average 77 cents for every dollar earned by men; pay for women of color has averaged even lower. Despite the activism of the Occupy Movement, more congressional legislation for women’s pay, and a rising minimum wage in many states, women’s overall pay continues to lag, even at the highest levels of elite careers!


Meanwhile, Wright and Toledo, along with co-editor M. L. Lyons, set out to edit an anthology of poetry about women in the workplace, knowing that it would be a daunting, yet important task. They hoped to bring together voices of women poets in the workspaces they occupy—much as Studs Terkel illuminated the lives of working people in his interviews, as Woody Guthrie celebrated in song, and as the iconic Mary Harris “Mother” Jones (at one time called “the most dangerous woman in America”) fought for in labor strikes, union organizing, and a seminal autobiography. Wright, Lyons and Toledo have brought together voices of women poets in the workspaces they occupy: from cotton rows to corner suites, trawlers to typing pools, nursing stations to space stations, factory floors to faculty offices. These voices bear witness to women’s workplace lives, and act to re-envision and refigure the world of work for women.


    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. 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. Here, and in gratitude to Lily Ledbetter, is the music of a movement, and it is one of the best of our time.

     —Carolyn Forché 


    Opening Raising Lilly Ledbetter, we enter a world that has been, like women’s work and working women historically, silenced or trivialized (or both). 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 in themselves 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.

    —-Cynthia Hogue, author of Revenance and Or Consequence


    Carolyne Wright is the author of nine books of poetry, four volumes of poetry in translation from Spanish and Bengali; and a collection of essays. She lived in Chile on a Fulbright Grant during the presidency of Salvador Allende; and spent four years on fellowship in India and Bangladesh, translating Bengali women poets. After visiting positions at universities around the country, Wright returned to her native Seattle in 2005, and teaches for the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts’ MFA Program and for Seattle’s Richard Hugo House. She is a Contributing Editor for the Pushcart Prizes.



    Eugenia Toledo was born in Temuco, Chile, grew up in the same neighborhood as Pablo Neruda, and came to the U.S. for doctoral studies after her university instructorship was eliminated following the 1973 military coup. She has published four books of poetry and a creative writing text in Spanish. An award-winning bilingual manuscript of poems is Trazas de mapa, trazas de sangre / Map Traces, Blood Traces—emerged from a return visit to Chile in 2008 with Carolyne Wright. Poems of hers in translation by Wright have appeared widely. With her husband, Toledo divides her time between Temuco and Seattle.


    M.L. Lyons was born and raised in Southern California by her Iranian father and American mother. Lyons earned an MFA in Creative Writing and was awarded a Klepser Fellowship through the University of Washington. She translated the poetry of Forough Farrokhzad as part of her MFA thesis on Farrokhzad’s influence on modern Persian poetry. As a longtime advocate for women’s rights, she created the first Women in the Arts Festival at the University of Washington. Her poetry and prose have appeared in Raven Chronicles, Terrain.org and Pontoon, among other publications.

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