On June 25, 2013, Texas State Senator Wendy Davis filibustered the Texas State Senate to prevent the passage of a law intended to severely restrict access to abortion in Texas. Reading aloud from a lengthy prepared text, Davis was able to thwart an overwhelmingly Republican, white male majority that many believe is intent on limiting the constitutional right to an abortion to the point of its de facto annihilation. With Let Her Speak, Counterpath presents, for the first time in print, the complete transcript of the filibuster, from Senator Davis’s first words on the Senate floor, to the point where it was decided by the Senate President that she could no longer continue. It is a document alive with American history, the struggle of women to carve out basic human rights, and a heroic 10-hour effort—Davis literally standing in one place, speaking and reading, arguing with other Senators—that infiltrates the timed machinations of the law with the defiant text of one of the most important political movements of our time. To celebrate and extend Davis’s act of protest, readings of the entire transcript were held on Saturday, November 2, and Sunday, November 3, 2013. Counterpath hosted a reading at its venue in Denver, Colorado—videos of this event are interspersed through the text of the transcript below on this web page—with parallel readings at Innisfree Books in Boulder, Colorado, in Durham, NC, at the Spider House Cafe in Austin, Texas, and at Bluestockings Bookstore in New York City. Participation in these readings was open to the public, with each reader being given about 6 pages of the printed transcript to read. Additional readings are currently being planned in New York City and Raleigh, NC. Please feel free to contact Counterpath program coordinator Oren Silverman at [email protected] if you would like to organize a reading or have any questions. Press coverage of these events: An article in Guernica about the Austin reading can be found here. An article in the conservative Townhall is here. Early coverage of the Denver event is here. The Austin reading set up its own website, with a signup sheet and ways to participate from afar. Preliminary coverage of this event is here. Facebook page is here. A snapshot of the Durham reading (video courtesy of Erin Espelie), which took place Saturday, November 2, 2013, is here. With local press coverage here and here. The transcript itself made it onto Christopher Higgs’s 2013 National Book Award longlist at HTML Giant. “An important work of conceptual/performance art and an important work of radical political action against the war on women.”

From two top New York Times journalists, the breathtaking untold story of the plan to overturn Roe v. Wade and the consequences for women, abortion, and the future of America In June 2022, Americans watched in shock as the Supreme Court reversed one of the nation’s landmark rulings. For nearly a half century, Roe was synonymous with women’s rights and freedoms. Then, suddenly, it was gone. In their groundbreaking book The Fall of Roe, Elizabeth Dias and Lisa Lerer reveal the explosive inside story of how it happened. Their investigation charts the shocking political and religious campaign to take down abortion rights and remake American families, womanhood, and the nation itself. Reeling from Barack Obama's 2012 landslide presidential victory – and motivated by a spiritual mission – a small but determined network of elite conservative Christian lawyers and powerbrokers worked quietly and methodically to keep their true cause alive: ending abortion rights. Thinking in generational terms, they devised a strategic, top-down takeover at every level of political and legal life, from little-known anti-abortion lobbyists in far flung statehouses to the arbiters of the constitution at the highest court in the land. Broad swaths of liberal America did not register the severity of the threat until it was far too late. At a moment when women had more power than ever before, the feminist movement suffered one of the greatest political defeats in American history. With stunning scope, journalistic rigor, and unprecedented access to the highest echelons of conservative and liberal power, Dias and Lerer chronicle the end of the Roe era. Their reporting stretches from inside abortion clinics to the halls of the White House, exposing powerful behind-the-scenes actors and recasting the actions of those already in the spotlight. The result is a sweeping and intimate narrative of secrets, power, jaw-dropping revelations, and a beacon to guide us forward.

"Anyone who looks beyond the bestseller lists can see that the literary landscape outside its commercial walls is just as varied as that of visual art, just as wild, just as conceptual: novels in the form of dioramas, narratives read through virtual-reality glasses, or told as a series of tweets, stories told as recipes, poems in skywriting, genetic code, pixels, skin-as well as print and sound. The 100+ prose works and poems that make up Conceptualisms all have the strangeness authors have always given ordinary speech in order to transform it into literature. In fact, this strangeness, or unfamiliarity, may be the very core of what makes writing literature, and pushed to its boundaries, what makes literature conceptual. Experimental, conceptual, avant-garde, hybrid, surfiction, fusion, radical, slip-stream, avant-pop, postmodern, self-conscious, innovative, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, alternative, anti- or new literature.... Across the years, a variety of names have been used to describe fiction, poetry and hybrid writing that, like conceptual visual art, foregrounds its ideas, explores new forms, challenges mainstream writing traditions, strives for ways to speak to the present. Along with whatever else they do, they ask, Why isn't this also literature?-and keep the boundaries of literature flexible and unresolved. Now, for the first time, here is an anthology that offers an overview of this other tradition as it lives in the early decades of the 21st century. The first major anthology of this other tradition, Conceptualisms presents writing by over 90 authors, across three generations, representing a plethora of aesthetics and approaches to their subjects. Readers will recognize authors who have shaped the nature of contemporary writing, such Lydia Davis, Charles Bernstein, Nathaniel Mackey, David Foster Wallace, and Claudia Rankine. They'll also find authors, and responses to the canon, that they haven't yet encountered. Conceptualisms is a book of ideas for writers, teachers and scholars, as well as readers who wonder how many ways literature can live"--

Winner of the 2017 N. Katherine Hayles Award for Criticism of Electronic Literature A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2018 The digital age has had a profound impact on literary culture, with new technologies opening up opportunities for new forms of literary art from hyperfiction to multi-media poetry and narrative-driven games. Bringing together leading scholars and artists from across the world, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature is the first authoritative reference handbook to the field. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, this book explores the foundational theories of the field, contemporary artistic practices, debates and controversies surrounding such key concepts as canonicity, world systems, narrative and the digital humanities, and historical developments and new media contexts of contemporary electronic literature. Including guides to major publications in the field, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Electronic Literature is an essential resource for scholars of contemporary culture in the digital era.

Inclusive Aims: Rhetoric’s Role in Reproductive Justice engages with fraught reproductive realities—past, present, and future—and offers analysis and advice for coalitional alliance and strategy building. For those who legitimately value the needs, desires, and safety of reproducing people, recent years have demonstrated that in the United States especially, reproductive matters represent not only contestation but extreme precarity. Considering such pressing exigencies, those pursuing just reproductive politics can benefit from thinking about such events and actions rhetorically, and not in isolation but as interconnected and connected to larger webs of action. The collection features a range of activist-scholars and scholar-activists, each of whom shares and/or interrogates stories of reproductive in/justice. Its topics range from discourse practices related to telehealth, birthing doula care, and negligence due to systemic racism and transphobia to representations of vasectomy, strategies for political solidarity, and considerations for navigating the challenges of activist interventions. The project mindfully infuses insights from thought-traditions of reproductive justice activists and scholars outside of rhetoric. Through its varied chapters, the collection demonstrates how rhetorics of reproductive politics function as a means by which various injustices are illuminated and addressed. Contributors include Zachary Beare, Fabiola Carrión, Hannah Dudley-Shotwell, Natalie Fixmer-Oraiz, Meta Henty, Adele N. Nichols, Sheri Rysdam, Shui-yin Sharon Yam, Michelle C. Smith, Melissa Stone, Jill Swiencicki, Jenna Vinson, and James D. Warwood.

Jessica Valenti explores modern motherhood and the choice to have children.

The U.S. Capitol abounds in magnificent art that rivals its exterior architectural splendor. The fine art held by the U.S. Senate comprises much of this treasured heritage. It spans over 200 years of history & contains works by such celebrated artists as Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Hiram Powers, Daniel Chester French, Charles Willson Peale, Gilbert Stuart, Walker Hancock, & Alexander Calder. This volume provides previously unpublished information on the 160 paintings & sculptures in the U.S. Senate. Each work of art -- from portraiture of prominent senators to scenes depicting significant events in U.S. history -- is illus. with a full-page color photo, accompanied by an essay & secondary images that place the work in historical & aesthetic context.