Who am I?
I grew up in a family that was focused on people, poetry, and politics. My parents both worked with children with disabilities in Massachusetts and my mother ran a daycare center in our house. As a reader, student, poet, and then editor, I’ve drawn on those experiences and expectations, and have searched through books looking for their echoes. Since 2007, I've edited books at Yale University Press where I'm currently Senior Executive Editor. I have a BA from Cornell University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I've also worked in various publishing roles at ICM, Continuum, and Harvard University Press.
Jennifer's book list on birth, one of our greatest underexplored subjects
Discover why each book is one of Jennifer's favorite books.
Why did Jennifer love this book?
This remarkable book is undoubtedly one of the most ambitious and omnivorous prose accounts of birth in the English language.
I encountered it early in my research on birth, when I was hungering for books that explored it as a topic of broad human concern and that went beyond the strictly personal. In critiquing the “institution” of motherhood, and the exploitation that has accompanied it for many women, Rich simultaneously unearths the power within birth – its fertile creativity – and imagines new ways of understanding it.
Rich is a wonderful stylist who uses what she calls an “odd-fangled” approach. I’ve loved this book for its “odd-fangledness” but also for how Rich combines critique with love, anger with reverence.
1 author picked Of Woman Born as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
The experience is her own-as a woman, a poet, a feminist, and a mother-but it is an experience determined by the institution, imposed on all women everywhere. She draws on personal materials, history, research, and literature to create a document of universal importance.
- Coming soon!