“Once upon a time there was an old woman who loved to knit. She lived with her Old Man in the middle of a woods in a curious one-room schoolhouse which was rather untidy, and full of wool.” If you enjoy knitting, then you’ve no doubt heard of Elizabeth Zimmermann, …
A sculptor, installation and video artist primarily producing works that address the experiences of Black women, Simone Leigh has received a multitude of honors. She now adds the first African-American woman to represent the United States at the prestigious Venice Biennale to that list. Leigh works primarily in ceramics, a …
Yo ho, yo ho, it was a pirate’s life for her. Mary Read spent much of her life dressed in male clothing, engaging in the traditional male activities of the time like soldiering, sailoring and eventually, pirating. It seems she was born to it. With her sailor husband was lost …
Wilma Mankiller was the first woman chief of the Cherokee Nation whose work helped to change a century of government policy.
Saturday Night Live has championed women comics, actors and writers since its debut on Oct. 11, 1975. We know the names — Jane Curtin, Gilda Radner, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, Leslie Jones, Aidy Bryant — and the first SNL performer to win an Emmy since 1993, Kate …
All young illustrator Dalia Messick wanted was to create a famous comic strip. She tried for the first time after graduating from high school in the mid-1920s, with no luck. She moved to Chicago to study at the Art Institute of Chicago, then took a job designing greeting cards and …
The images are striking. A toddler, his tiny sock caught on barbed wire as he’s passed through a barricade in Albania. A couple holding hands as they walk down a street filled with burning wreckage from a Haitian earthquake. A young refugee from the war in Sierra Leone jubilantly raising …
Most of what I know about poetry can be summed up in this opening line: “There once was a girl from Nantucket …” I’m kidding, of course (kind of). But we’re talking poetry today because American poet Louise Glück was just awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature. In announcing …
She lived 95 years, as many years as necessary to complete the work she felt called to do. And the FBI maintained a file on her up until the end. Educator. Newspaper publisher. Civil rights activist. Housing and labor rights advocate. Outspoken critic of police violence. Vice presidential candidate. Charlotta …
As a war correspondent, Dickey Chapelle talked her way onto the front lines of battlefields from WWII to Vietnam and revolutions in places like Hungary, Algeria, Lebanon and Cuba. Unmistakable in her uniform of fatigues, harlequin glasses and pearl earrings, Dickey covered the world’s hotspots. She took photos under fire …