Named one of the Best Books of 1987 by Library Journal

Selected by Utne Reader as part of its Alternative Canon in 1998

One of Hungry Mind Review's Best 100 Books of the 20th Century

Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa's experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the essays and poems in this volume profoundly challenged, and continue to challenge, how we think about identity. Borderlands/La Frontera remaps our understanding of what a border is, presenting it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us. This edition, coming March 1, 2022, will be a more condensed edition, containing only the original text from 1987, and will be at a more accessible price point for readers. For those looking for a scholarly context to this crucial work, the Critical Edition is currently available.

The emotional and intellectual impact of the book is disorienting and powerful...all languages are spoken, and survival depends on understanding all modes of thought. In the borderlands new creatures come into being. Anzaldúa celebrates this new mestiza in bold, experimental writing. -- The Village Voice

Anzaldúa's pulsating weaving of innovative poetry with sparse informative prose brings us deep into the insider/outsider consciousness of the borderlands; that ancient and contemporary, crashing and blending world that divides and unites America. -- Women's Review of Books

This critical edition of text that changed the course of Chicanx, queer, and feminist theory breathes new life into the themes still present in today's political and social climate.

At the same time this book offers insight into the construction of Anzaldúa's philosophies.

Borderlands was first published in 1987 after an organic composition process, mixing prose and poetry and integrating personal memories with a philosophical search for a consciousness-raising and coalition-building method for the oppressed. Conceptually innovative, visionary, and rebellious at the time, Borderlands has continued to be studied as a distinctive creative work and a spiritual guidebook to heal and empower Chicanxs, queer communities of color, and other marginalized groups. Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa's experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the essays and poems in Borderlands/La Frontera, her first book and signature work, remap our understanding of borders as psychic, social, and cultural terrains that we inhabit and that inhabit all of us.

Drawing heavily on archival research and a comprehensive literature review, this critical edition elucidates Anzaldúa's complex composition process and its centrality in the development of her philosophy and contextualizes the book within her theories and writings before and after its 1987 publication. It opens with two introductory studies; offers a corrected text, explanatory footnotes, translations, and four archival appendices; and closes with an updated bibliography of Anzaldúa's works, an extensive scholarly bibliography on Borderlands, and her biography. It also featuress features an afterword by noted Anzaldúa scholar AnaLouise Keating.

Imagine Borderlands as a timeless pyramid of ideas that has been added to, deconstructed, reconstructed, transcribed, translated, and trans-interpreted by every generation of Chicanx and non-Chicanx feminist scholars in the thirty-five years since its publication. This critical edition offers both a painstakingly articulated scholarly scaffolding around Anzaldúa's original text and a bridge into the life and memory of the author who designed the blueprint of that pyramid. -- Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Professor of Chicana/o Studies, English, and Gender Studies, UCLA

Vivancos-Pérez takes readers by the hand in this straightforward, well-crafted edition, offering a detailed introduction describing the eminent author's iterative process of writing Borderlands. The archival documents--including unpublished poetry and essays with Anzaldúa's own annotations--add flavor, temperament, and in-depth insight into the complex philosopher's early writings. Scholars, students, family, soul-mates, and friends of Anzaldúa (myself included) will be thrilled with this long-awaited, noteworthy critical edition. -- Emma Pérez, author of The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History

Ricardo F. Vivancos-Pérez's meticulous archival work and Norma Elia Cantú's life experience and expertise converge to offer a stunning resource for Anzaldúa scholars; for writers, artivists, and activists inspired by her work; and for everyone. Hereafter, no study of Borderlands will be complete without this beautiful, essential reference. -- Paola Bacchetta, Professor of Gender & Women's Studies, UC Berkeley

Readers will delight in the new pathways to Anzaldúan thought thanks to the work of the editors. Whether coming to Anzaldúan thought for the first time or returning again to a much-treasured Borderlands, the editors' loving care will enable us all to hear her call--no hay más que cambiar ... there's nothing else to do but change. -- Nancy Tuana, author of Beyond Philosophy: Nietzsche, Foucault, Anzaldúa

Fifteen stories invite you to get comfortable in the dark, to consider freedom and sacrifice, trust and betrayal, otherness, and safety. Marisol, an aspiring jewelry artist is haunted by a fast-food icon. Chevella, a self-aware doll, finds herself in 1950s America playing a key role in the Civil Rights Movement. Lindsay, a Black girl in 1970s America wins an extraterrestrial in a national contest only to find her family's life upended. Chelsea and Jessa, two sisters, fight about what a strange child means for their family. A meat grinder appears in a magical forest and chaos ensues. All this and more.

Rooted in a Chicana/Latina/indigenous geographic and cultural sensibility, the stories of flesh to bone take on the force of myth, old and new, giving voice to those who experience the disruption and violence of the borderlands. In these nine tales, silva metes out a furious justice--a whirling, lyrical energy--that scatters the landscape with bones of transformation, reclamation, and healing.

...An original and authentic voice...with a unique vision. A blend of indigenismo and folktales retold in a modern vein...these stories come from the clouds, from spirits of ancient ancestors, from the oblique corners of the human consciousness...A new and engaging duende is born. -- Alejandro Murguia, author of This War Called Love

If Chagall had written, he would have painted words in the fierce brushstrokes of ire'ne lara silva's stories. If Remedios Varo had told stories, she would have wound the tendrils of her magic the way ire'ne lara silva paints her world. -- Cecile Pineda, author Devil's Tango: How I Learned the Fukushima Step by Step

ire'ne lara silva writes about what's between dark shadow and daylight, when, as on the Day of the Dead, we are so aware of the sacred. Though fiction, ire'ne's prose seems to transform into chanting verse. -- Dagoberto Gilb, author of Before the End, After the Beginning: Stories

In her brilliant fiction debut, flesh to bone, ire'ne lara silva uses hauntingly lyrical language to tell stories cast in the Latin American tradition of Juan Rulfo and Maria Luisa Bombal. But, do not mistake this work for magical realism. The fantastical elements, raw voices, and shifting realities inhabit an emotional, psychological, and all-too-physical landscape of loss and violence. Life-affirming and intense, the stories sweep us into another world where we come face to face with the deepest truths. Brava! -- Norma Cantú, author of Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera

Winner of the 2002 American Book Award

Why was Red Shoes, the most formidable Choctaw warrior of the 18th century, assassinated by his own people? Why does his death haunt Auda Billy, an Oklahoma Choctaw woman, accused in 1991 of murdering Choctaw Chief Redford McAlester? Moving between the known details of Red Shoes' life and the riddle of McAlester's death, this novel traces the history of the Billy women whose destiny it is to solve both murders--with the help of a powerful spirit known as the Shell Shaker.

Very few writers can shift a narrative skillfully between centuries and negotiate an enemy language, tribal governments and a slew of spirits while doing so. Very few can translate the soul of such a legacy into words, and allow the shape of such a story to weave itself, like stomp dancers around the fire, naturally. LeAnne Howe has done it. Shell Shaker is an elegant, powerful and knock out story. I'm blown away. -- Joy Harjo, Mvskoke poet and musician

LeAnne Howe has written a gripping and magical tale of ancient Choctaw blood lust and unbreakable family love in modern-day Oklahoma. Shell Shaker is a delicious read, a powerful journey into the hearts of some incredibly strong Indian women. -- Adrian C. Louis, author of Skins

A brilliant, surprising, hilarious, heartbreaking work that layers vision upon vision and cracks America wide open. LeAnne Howe has created a literary landscape you have never seen before and will never forget. -- Susan Power, author of The Grass Dancer

Kathya Alexander triumphs in bringing the complexities of the civil rights era to life, complete with its injustices, anger, grief and tragedies. This is a very important book for today, as the U.S. potentially again finds itself in the grip of the illusion that violence will ever lead to anything good. - The Bay Area Reporter

Grappling with grief, ancestral trauma, and a family, community, and society in flux, Mandy dares to dream of a future outside the limitations of racism and patriarchy.

In the small town of Uz, Arkansas, Mandy Anderson wakes up on July 4th, 1963, her mother's birthday, to the sweltering Southern heat, a pounding headache, and the distinct thumping of her mother, Belle, kneading biscuit dough. In the raw heat, only made worse by Belle's baking, Mandy questions why the white woman her mother works for wouldn't want to give Belle the day off for her birthday. So begins Mandy's journey of questioning the structures that define her world, a path that carries her through tragedy, mystical encounters, and her own spiritual and familial legacy.

Kathya Alexander's debut historical fiction novel-in-verse follows the fiercely passionate, dedicated, and cheeky Mandy as she comes of age during the height of the Civil Rights Movement of the 20th century. Twelve-year-old Mandy and her mother, Belle, experience the extraordinary events of the 1960s, finding strength, fearlessness, and faith along the way.

This beautifully lyrical novel explores the reality of activism as more than just a handful of speeches given at protests, the costs to those who dedicate themselves to activist work, and the passion that drives us ever onward to a better, more just future.

El Mundo Zurdo 9 is a collection of diverse essays and poetry that offer scholarly and creative responses inspired by the life and work of Gloria Anzaldúa, selected from the 2022 meeting of The Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa.

Contributors include: Sylvia Mendoza Aviña, Javier Alejandro Camargo-Castillo, Araceli Esparza, Kimberly J. Davis, Mateo Rosales Fertig, Anel I. Flores, L Heidenreich, G. Sue Kasun, Melissa Auh Krukar, Irene Lara, Inmaculada Lara-Bonilla, Irasema Mora-Pablo, jo reyes-boitel, Viktoria Valenzuela

A bold collection of creative pieces and theoretical essays by women of color. Making Face, Making Soul includes over 70 works by poets, writers, artists, and activists such as Paula Gunn Allen, Norma Alarcón, Gloria Anzaldúa, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Barbara Christian, Chrystos, Sandra Cisneros, Michelle Cliff, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Elena Creef, Audre Lorde, María Lugones, Jewelle Gomez, Joy Harjo, bell hooks, June Jordan, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Janice Mirikitani, Pat Mora, Cherríe Moraga, Pat Parker, Chela Sandoval, Barbara Smith, Mitsuye Yamada, and Alice Walker.

Anzaldúa's unusual combination of scholarly research, folk tales, personal narrative, poetry and political manifesto, forms a powerful and cohesive whole. -- San Francisco Chronicle Review

Anzaldúa is an accomplished writer, able to marshal passionate intensity in support of her attempt to do away with dualities. -- Journal of the Southwest

She has chosen the most difficult task; that of mediating cultures without concession or dilution. -- Women's Review of Books

Propelled by a strong indigenist current, Anzaldúa assumes a prophetic voice to create--by mythic, spiritual, mystic, intuitive and imaginative means--a new vision... -- The Americas Review

Many of the best pieces...combine the theoretical essay with poetry and personal narration, reflecting a breadth of emotion that most people keep tightly concealed. This is the book's primary purpose, to give voice to thoughts and feelings which have been privatized and occluded. -- Publishers Weekly

Anzaldúa brings a poetic style steeped in Chicano/Chicana history and Aztec myth to bear upon issues that are too often treated in dry, theoretical terms...subverts the white middle-class perspective of much mainstream feminism with analysis, testimony, story, and song. -- Utne Reader

Good Girls Marry Doctors: South Asian American Daughters on Obedience and Rebellion, edited by Piyali Bhattacharya, is the first anthology to examine the multiple facets of daughterhood in South Asian American families.

The voices in this volume reveal how a Good Girl is trained to seamlessly blend professional success with the maintanence and reproduction of her family's cultural heritage. Her gratitude for her immigrant parents' sacrifices creates intense pressure to perform and embody the role of the perfect daughter. Yet, the demand for such perfection can stifle desire, curb curiosity, and make it fraught for a Good Girl to construct her own identity in the face of stern parental opinion.

Of course, this is not always the case. Certain stories in this collection uncover relationships between parents and daughters that are open and supportive while also being exacting. Many of the essays, however, dig into difficult truths about what it is to be a young woman in a world of overbearing cultural expectation.

Good Girls Marry Doctors is filled with honest stories, difficult and joyous, heartbreaking and hilarious, from a diverse array of powerful women. These narratives combine to expose struggles that are too often hidden from the public eye, while reminding those going through similar experiences that they are heard, and they are not alone.

Contributers: Ankita Rao, Ayesha Mattu, Fawzia Mirza, Hema Sarang-Sieminski, Jabeen Akhtar, Jyothi Natarajan, Leila Khan, Madiha Bhatti, Mathangi Subramanian, Meghna Chandra, Natasha Singh, Nayomi Munaweera, Neelanjana Banerjee, Phiroozeh Petigara, Piyali Bhattacharya, Rachna Khatau, Rajpreet Heir, Roksana Badruddoja, Sayantani DasGupta, SJ Sindu, Sona Charaipotra, Surya Kundu, Swati Khurana, Tanzila Ahmed, Tara Dorabji, Tarfia Faizullah, and Triveni Ghandi.

This collection is filled with stories that put into words the feelings and struggles that isolate daughters of the diaspora. ... There is pain. There is trauma. There is also humor and hope. In short: there is truth. Every story, every word comes from a place of vulnerability and pain -- from a struggle toward self-understanding and self-acceptance. These are the voices of women who have fought to be themselves and who have chosen to come back to their pain in order to offer a helping hand to the young girls and women who still inhabit that painful space. --Karen Marrujo, Poetry International

Foreword INDIES 2020 Silver Award Winner in LGBTQ+ Nonfiction

Independent Press Awards 2021 Winner in LGBTQ nonfiction

Golden Crown Literary Awards 2021 Nonfiction Winner

The burgeoning lesbian and feminist movements of the '70s and '80s created an impetus to form more independent and equitable social and cultural institutions--bookstores, publishers, health clinics, and more--to support the unprecedented surge in women's arts of all kinds. Olivia Records was at the forefront of these models, not only recording and distributing women's music but also creating important new social spaces for previously isolated women and lesbians through concerts and festivals.

Ginny Z. Berson, one of Olivia's founding members and visionaries, kept copious records during those heady days--days also fraught with contradictions, conflicts, and economic pitfalls. With great honesty, Berson offers her personal take on what those times were like, revisiting the excitement and the hardships of creating a fair and equitable lesbian-feminist business model--one that had no precedent.

In a time when lesbians' participation in mainstream culture and politics is often taken for granted, we need to recognize the miraculousness of what Olivia achieved. A few years after Stonewall, Olivia not only created the first women's record label, but in the face of pervasive bigotry and repression carved out a vibrant political space for lesbian freedom. --Barbara Smith, co-founder of the Combahee River Collective

The women's music movement was a revolution for rights and dignity, carving out a space where none existed before: for women to seize ownership of their own narrative, for lesbians who had never been reflected in popular music, for women to write love songs to other women. A small collective of idealistic women with absolutely no experience in the music business created a model that would change the landscape for all women, indeed, for all people. --Vicki Randle, musician

Ginny Berson's important memoir of building Olivia Records into a beloved lesbian institution is a timely narrative from a founding organizer. Ginny walks us through the politics, radical self-discovery, aching romantic tension, and quirky community organizing that characterized an era. In these chapters, we gain a front row seat to the collective processing that produced and distributed lesbian records, and meet the first generation of fans to experience women's music as lesbian liberation. --Bonnie J. Morris, PhD, author of Eden Built by Eves, The Disappearing L, and The Feminist Revolution

Shadow on a Tightrope is the first anthology to come out of the fat liberation movement. This classic collection includes articles, personal stories, and poems by fat women about their lives, experiences, and the fat-hating society in which we live.

Shadow does it all... It may be the most important feminist theory published this year. -- Lammas Review

Will open the eyes of even the most fat-phobic. If you read nothing else, read this. -- Feminist Bookstore News

Fear of fat is so entrenched in the American mind that even the most radical women, who have spent years exploring and rebuilding women's consciousness through the Women's Liberation Movement, have failed to spot the fraud. -- Vivian F. Mayer, The Fat Illusion

Bold, funny and on the edge, Hot Chicken Wings is Jewish and lesbian to the core. Jyl Lynn Felman breaks new ground in eleven highly crafted stories about family secrets, anti-Semitism, and sacred lesbian myths.

With her sharp-eyed sensibility and spare, distinctive prose, the work of Jyl Lynn Felman is always revealing as she traces the forbidden edges of being Jewish, female, lesbian at the end of the twentieth century. -- Adrienne Rich

[She] confronts race and ethnicity with a badly needed authenticity. Her bold, passionate style is well-suited for an uncanny willingness to explore core issues affecting us as people as well as individuals. -- Sabrina Sojourner, Congresswoman, activist, author of Psychic Scars and Other Mad Thoughts

Jyl Lynn Felman is a fearless and original writer, whose fiction breaks new boundaries and forms new links between writer and audience. Hot Chicken Wings attests to the power and sweep of her artistic vision. -- Lev Raphael

The Woman Who Owned the Shadows starts where the rest of the world leaves Indians off: at the brink of death. Ephanie Atencio is in the midst of a breakdown from which she can barely move. She has been left by her husband and is unable to take care of her children. To heal, Ephanie must seek, however gropingly, her own future. She leaves New Mexico for San Francisco, where she begins again the process of remembering, of trying to sort out the parts of her, ultimately finding a way to herself, relying no longer on men, but on her primary connections to the spirit women of her people and to the women of her own world.

An absorbing, often fascinating world is created...not only is it an exploration of racism, it is often a powerful and moving testament to feminism. -- The New York Times Book Review

Ephanie's search for her own definition, for her strength, for her self, is intricate and stark as the spirit shawl she weaves, a bridge between her and Spider Woman, between the old power and new pain of her people. In her history lies the seed of promise, and her journeys weave hauntingly through many realities. -- Audre Lorde

The Woman Who Owned the Shadows is a book full of power...the kind of power that wells up from the earth like a hot spring, the power to change, to heal, to cleanse... -- Joseph Bruchac

The Woman Who Owned the Shadows is one of the first novels by and about contemporary Indian women...It is a new form, one of many evolving in mixed-blood women's literature, circular, cyclical, bringing all time and life into the present. -- Linda Hogan

The Woman Who Owned the Shadows is a book that, if you come with an honest heart, will change the way you think and feel. It will help us--all of us--to grow up...to become intelligent, caring, sensitive beings who use both sides of their brains for their perceptions. Don't miss out on it. -- Judy Grahn

Paula Gunn Allen has given us...a sensitive, sophisticated, forceful portrait of a contemporary American Indian woman, a valuable addition to the increasingly impressive list of novels by American Indians. -- American Indian Culture and Research Journal

After years of teaching women's studies courses and seeing the frustration, paralysis and depression of young students who grapple with the hard realities of social activism, Leela Fernandes has written a social critique that examines contemporary feminism and social justice movements. She discusses straightforwardly the problems with social justice organizations, academia and identity politics. She also poses a solution: that individuals--feminists and other social justice activists--create their own non-institutional spiritual base, one that will sustain them through the hard ethical choices needed in contemporary social justice activism.

Speaking of political and spiritual transformation in the same breath, she presses for a sacred understanding of our selves both as individuals and as a part of a larger interconnected world...In offering a compelling alternative vision of feminist practice--demanding nothing less that a spiritual revolution--Fernandes has taken the next step. Transforming Feminist Practice is an indispensable book for activistas and thinkers. -- Gloria E. Anzaldúa

Leela Fernandes' refreshing new book--which argues that spiritual social activism offers a material way to create change--is required reading for all those concerned to create a more just world. In this courageous and timely volume, Fernandes demonstrates how to undermine the misguided dichotomy between the spiritual and the material, and thus provides possibilities for all of us who are politically engaged to imagine alternatives to the current political impasse in which we find ourselves. Brava! -- Kum-Kum Bhavnani, Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Women, Culture and Development Program, UCSB

Courageous...Provocative...Deeply inspiring. Leela Fernandes travels right to the heart of feminism's most cherished practices with a map of the transformative power of the spiritual at a time when our radical social projects most urgently need it. We cannot afford to ignore this invitational challenge. -- M. Jacqui Alexander

Miko Kings is set in Indian Territory's queen city, Ada, Oklahoma, during the baseball fever of 1907, but moves back and forth from 1969 during the Vietnam War to present-day Ada. The story focuses on an Indian baseball team but brings a new understanding to the term America's favorite pastime. For tribes in Indian Territory, baseball was an extension of a sport they'd been playing for centuries before their forced removal to Indian Territory. In this lively and humorous work of fiction informed by careful historical research, LeAnne Howe weaves original and fictive documents such as newspaper clippings, photographs, typewritten letters, and handwritten journal entries into the narrative.

LeAnne Howe's Miko Kings is an incredible act of recovery: baseball, a sport jealously guarded by mainstream Anglo culture, is also rooted in Native American history and territory. The irony behind its status as the all-American pastime is not lost on Howe as she weaves these compelling stories and narratives to expose the political games of the 20th century that Native Americans learned to play for resistance and survival. -- Rigoberto González, author of So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water Until It Breaks and Butterfly Boy

a fascinating, frightening book
Mirabella
an invaluable contribution to the literature of censorship
Booklist
this book will allow a cooler, more informed discussion of an important debate.
Library Journal

Untangling knots of personal identity and family history, Nancy Agabian deftly weaves a narrative alternately comical and wrenching. Moving between memories of growing up Armenian and American in Walpole, Massachusetts, and her later experiences at Wellesley College, then Hollywood and, finally, Turkey, Agabian offers an illuminating meditation on the sometimes bizarre entanglement of individual desire (sexual and otherwise) in the web of family life and history. At the heart of this unraveling is a grappling with the history of trauma and upheaval experienced by her paternal grandmother, who survived the Armenian Genocide, and the legacy of that wounding experience for Agabian and her extended family.

What's so refreshing about Agabian's prose is her marvelously open, daring, and honest inquiry into the self. Our enfant terrible--she has yet again managed to capture us with her quirky, brilliant stories. -- Shushan Avagyan, author of Girk-anvernagir; translator of I Want to Live: Poems of Shushanik Kurghinian

My favorite song from Nancy Agabian's improbably vivid Guitar Boy punk rock period a decade ago was the genius anthem I Don't Want to be a Victim Anymore. Though as she noted at the time, when you're a mousily timid, family-mired, Armenian bisexual artist, not tending toward victimhood isn't all that easy. But you know what? By the end of this splendidly engrossing memory chronicle, she's pulled it off. She's no victim. What she is is funny, smart, generous and wise. And she's my hero. -- Lawrence Weschler, National Book Critics Circle Award Winner, Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences

The first international anthology of Filipina writers published in the United States.

Babaylan reflects the complex history of a people whose roots have stretched to both sides of the globe. With contributions from over 60 Filipina and Filipina American writers, Babaylan provides readers with a comprehensive view of a growing and vibrant transnational literary culture. Challenging, innovative, fierce, reflective, somber, funny-no one word can capture the extraordinary range of this collection. The voices represented in this collection offer a broad and varied perspective on the Filipina writer whose diasporic existence is a living, breathing bridge, not only between countries but also generations, as strong voices from the past fuel realities of the future.

Babaylan brings to the concert halls of the United States a full-bodied chorus of Filipino women's voices. Welcome the songs and stories of these women with applause. Bravo! --Edna Zapanta-Manlapaz, Professor at Ateneo de Manila University and editor of Song of Ourselves

This collection of work by Filipina writers inspires with passion, delights with lush imagery and sound, and swells with unbridled language. Brave and beautiful, these many-voiced, multifaceted authors gave readers the first comprehensive look at a literary culture that has been ignored for far too long. --Allison Jospeph, author of In Every Seam

These are the stories and moments of women--some heartbreaking, some funny, all true to the heart. And the Phillipines is always present: as a landscape, memory, ghost. Babaylan is a feast for the senses, so eat your fill. --Andrea Louie, Publications Director of the Asian American Writers' Workshop and author of Moon Cakes

I am humbled studying these thoughts of my sisters. Theirs is not a knowledge that changes with the whims of society but a wisdom that will forever move with the contents of the universe. Darryl Babe Wilson, author of The Morning the Sun Went Down

Animal stories have been handed down through the rich oral traditions of over five hundred distinct American Indian languages and cultures, offering understanding about and guidance to the natural and social worlds. The fiction and poetry gathered in this collection honor these traditions, retelling and reshaping traditional narratives, by recalling their ancient wisdom and renewing their spirit in new contexts.

Contributors

Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, Elizabeth C. Ali, Paula Gunn Allen, Salli M. Kawennotakie Benedict, Gloria Bird, Linda Boyden, Beth Brant, Carmen Buchanan, Ella Cara Deloria, Carolyn Dunn, Anita Endrezze, Louise Erdrich,

Lynda Martinez Foley, Janice Gould, Joy Harjo, Inéeacute;s Hernáaacute;ndez-Ávila, Roberta Hill, Linda Hogan, Monelle Boyett Holley, LeAnne Howe, Mary Ike, Shaunna McCovey, Judith Minty, Deborah Miranda, MariJo Moore, Mourning Dove, Jody Nokwisa Peiffer-Willett, Georgia Orcutt, Dawn Karima Pettigrew, Suzanne Rancourt, Catherine Ruiz

Cheryl Savageau, Stephanie Sellers, Leslie Marmon Silko, Griselda Suárez, Mary TallMountain, Luci Tapahonso

Georgiana Valoyce-Sanchez, Lela Northcross Wakely

Political activist and writer Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz brought an insightful eye and a sharp analytical mind to probe the problems facing America at the turn of the century. First published in 1992, the hard-hitting essays in this collection scan the connections across a wide range of issues: whether the topic is class, racism, Israel and Palestine, war, anti-Semitism, violence against women or violence by women, the issue is power--in all its complexity. Now in its second edition and no less relevant nearly three decades later, her work--dedicated, persistent--continues to remind us of the strength in community.

Beginning at the intersection of sex, race, class, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, Kaye/Kantrowitz asks hard questions in these essays about power, violence, resistance, and victimhood. ... At the core of The Issue Is Power is a smart, engaged observer of the world who invites us to think and act with her. --from the new foreword byJulie R. Enszer

Here is a book for everyone who dares to want to help make history. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitzis passionate, strategic, pithy, generous, realistic, controversial, unquenchable--like the best of our movements for change. As a writer and lifelong doer, she gives us reasons to believe in achievable justice, and maps for acting on that belief. --Adrienne Rich

If we ever needed people like Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz--people who think strategically, whose writing is rooted in activism, and who have the courage to explore ideas in public--it is now...this essay urges activists to write, to speak, to organize, to take a moral stance and to put their talents to turning the tide. -- Women's Review of Books