Women Writing Cloth: Migratory Fictions in the American Imaginary argues that cloth-work serves as a textual signifier of mobility and preservation, constituting a revolt against a devaluation of cultural heritage and a distrust of the self. Bona develops a new framework for examining analogies between weaving and storytelling, the flow of needlework across place and time, women's labor and status, and the power of cloth-work as both means and metaphor for cultural reintegration across borders.

"A sumptuous selection of short fiction and poetry. . . . Its invitation to share the passion of women's voices characterizes the entire volume."--"USA Today."

Women Writing Cloth: Migratory Fictions in the American Imaginary performs a ground-breaking intervention by uncovering the relationship between literary cloth-working women and migration in a range of American novels across centuries. Bona demonstrates how four authors, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Alice Walker, Sandra Cisneros, and Adria Bernardi, innovate on pre-modern stories of weaving women in order to explore the intricate connections between handwork, resourcefulness, and mobility. Refracted through the lens of women’s migratory experiences vis-à-vis cloth-working aesthetics, Women Writing Cloth examines varied aspects of sewing—embroidering, quilting, and rebozo-making—as textual signifiers of mobility and preservation. Through authorial innovation,women’s handwork constitutes a revolt against a devaluation of cultural heritage and a distrust of the self. Women Writing Cloth argues that literary, cloth-working women inspire paradigmatic shifts in social codes due to portable skills that enabled their survival in the new world. Bona paints a complex picture of women whose migratory experiences taught them how to live within a stigmatizing culture and beneath institutional powers to control their artistry. Fabric designs assume fuller multicultural meaning when textiles cross borders and tell unspeakable stories that expose constraints typifying gender, race, and heritage. The authors examined simulate the artistic creativity of cloth-work by interrogating traditional assumptions about representation, chronology, and spatial boundaries. Women Writing Cloth breaks new ground to reveal the elaborate relationship between cloth-work expertise and women’s mobility. Variations of cloth-working women showcase a relationship between subversive artistry and institutional oppressions that compel strategies of resistance, enable survival, and, inspired by migration, construct inventive fabric creations. Women Writing Cloth engages the activity of cloth work as a means of reclamation and subversive expression represented in American literature.

THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Women in Clothes is a book unlike any other. It is essentially a conversation among hundreds of women of all nationalities—famous, anonymous, religious, secular, married, single, young, old—on the subject of clothing, and how the garments we put on every day define and shape our lives. It began with a survey. The editors composed a list of more than fifty questions designed to prompt women to think more deeply about their personal style. Writers, activists, and artists including Cindy Sherman, Kim Gordon, Kalpona Akter, Sarah Nicole Prickett, Tavi Gevinson, Miranda July, Roxane Gay, Lena Dunham, and Molly Ringwald answered these questions with photographs, interviews, personal testimonies, and illustrations. Even our most basic clothing choices can give us confidence, show the connection between our appearance and our habits of mind, express our values and our politics, bond us with our friends, or function as armor or disguise. They are the tools we use to reinvent ourselves and to transform how others see us. Women in Clothes embraces the complexity of women’s style decisions, revealing the sometimes funny, sometimes strange, always thoughtful impulses that influence our daily ritual of getting dressed.

"A fascinating history of…[a craft] that preceded and made possible civilization itself." —New York Times Book Review New discoveries about the textile arts reveal women's unexpectedly influential role in ancient societies. Twenty thousand years ago, women were making and wearing the first clothing created from spun fibers. In fact, right up to the Industrial Revolution the fiber arts were an enormous economic force, belonging primarily to women. Despite the great toil required in making cloth and clothing, most books on ancient history and economics have no information on them. Much of this gap results from the extreme perishability of what women produced, but it seems clear that until now descriptions of prehistoric and early historic cultures have omitted virtually half the picture. Elizabeth Wayland Barber has drawn from data gathered by the most sophisticated new archaeological methods—methods she herself helped to fashion. In a "brilliantly original book" (Katha Pollitt, Washington Post Book World), she argues that women were a powerful economic force in the ancient world, with their own industry: fabric.

Discusses the obstacles women have had to overcome in order to become writers, and identifies the sexist rationalizations used to trivialize their contributions

Eighteen women, including Jamaica Kincaid, Rigoberta Menchú, Cherríe Moraga, Marjorie Agosin, Margaret Randall, Gloria Anzaldúa, Michelle Cliff, Edwidge Danticat, and Julia Alvarez, are featured in this powerful anthology on art, feminism, and activism in Latin America and the Caribbean. Women Writing Resistance highlights Latin American and Caribbean women writers who, with increasing urgency, are writing in the service of social justice and against the entrenched patriarchal, racist, and exploitative regimes that have ruled their countries. Many of the women in this collection have been thrust out into the Latino-Caribbean diaspora by violent forces that make differences in language and culture seem less significant than connections based on resistance to inequality and oppression. It is these connections that Women Writing Resistance highlights, presenting "conversations" on the potential of writing to confront injustice. This mixed-genre anthology, a resource for activists and readers of Latin American and Caribbean women's literature, demonstrates and enacts how women can collaborate across class, race and nationality, and illustrates the value of this solidarity in the ongoing struggles for human rights and social justice in the Americas. Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez earned her Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University, specializing in contemporary Caribbean, Latin American, and ethnic North American autobiographies by women. She teaches literature and gender studies courses at Simon's Rock College of Bard, and is also a faculty member at the University at Albany, SUNY.