"Heart Room and Hyacinths: A Wordsmith's Journal of Joy" is author Dori Jeanine Somers's life story-an epic poem set in a world of change and a journey of chosen joys and myriad gifts.

In this memoir, Somers shares her life story, interspersed with poetry she has written over the years. She traces the history of herself and her family, from her childhood to her grandchildren, recalling important events along the way and the wisdom she gained from them.

None of the things she has learned along the way is new or startling. They are the truths she knew, but didn't know she knew, until she gave them form upon the page. These discoveries might be the same for anyone-something held in the heart, sometimes completely unnoticed. The thoughts written here serve as simple reminders of your own inner wisdom, glimmers of your own special light. Dive into that pool of light, warmed in the glow of the messages here, and make any words that brighten the day a part of an inner glow.

When author Michelle Matthews came home from war, she thought returning alive meant the worst was over. She was mistaken; surviving life after war proved to be equally challenging. Matthews returned a changed person. In Re-entry, she narrates a poignant account of the war in Iraq, its tragic aftermath, and her courageous journey to heal emotionally.

Based on journal entries and e-mails sent before, during, and after her service in Iraq, this memoir provides a firsthand account of the trials and tribulations she experienced by her service and gives insight into her emotional journey. Upon her return, Matthews struggled with anxiety and depression and began overeating and abusing alcohol. She tells how she wrestled with thoughts of suicide as she found normal life overwhelming following the abnormal rhythm of war.

"Re-entry" shows that how, through counseling, physical and recreational therapy, journaling, meditating, exercising, and support from family and friends, Matthews found herself again.

Mary Leapor (1722-1746) was the kitchen-maid daughter of a Northamptonshire gardener. In the past 15 years, her works have been recovered from deep obscurity and she has been widely recognized as possibly the most important woman poet of the eighteenth century. This new edition, the first in 250 years, provides an accurate text of all her known works, including prose and drama. The volume has a substantial introduction summarizing all that is known of her life and providing an over-view of current scholarship. It also provides textual notes and detailed commentary on individual works. This long-anticipated edition is expected to become a landmark in eighteenth-century studies.

From the 1960s to the 1980s, a range of academic possibilities for women developed, as their career histories and intellectual biographies reveal. Some women sought to generate a new knowledge specialty in their disciplines, often explicitly defying admonishments that the subject matter was an oxymoron. Others pursued academic paths that disregarded these new opportunities and developments. Together their accounts portray how feminist scholarship emerged and was facilitated by historically specific conditions: a critical mass of like-minded women, a national political movement, an abundance of financial support for doctoral candidates, a tolerance from established faculty for students to pursue the margins of disciplinary scholarship, and an organizational capacity to add new academic categories for courses, programs, academic positions, and extra-departmental groups. That historical era has since been supplanted by feminist infighting and backlash, as well as more cost-conscious academic management practices, which have altered the academic landscape for knowledge creation. Analyzing the accounts of academic women during this era yields a conceptual framework for understanding how new knowledge is created on multiple levels--through personal reflection on life experiences, disciplinary legacies, local organizational contexts, and wider societal expectations.

Despite the West's privileging of slenderness as an aesthetic ideal, the African Diaspora has historically displayed a resistance to the Western European and North American indulgence in 'fat anxiety.' The Embodiment of Disobedience explores the ways in which the African Diaspora has rejected the West's efforts to impose imperatives of slenderness and mass market fat-anxiety. Author Andrea Shaw explores the origins and contradictions of this phenomenon, especially the cultural deviations in beauty criteria and the related social and cultural practices. Unique in its examination of how both fatness and blackness interact on literary cultural planes, this book also offers a diasporic scope that develops previously unexamined connections among female representations throughout the African Diaspora.

Covering the history and contributions of black women intellectuals from the late 19th century to the present, this book highlights individuals who are often overlooked in the study of the American intellectual tradition. This edited volume of essays on black women intellectuals in modern U.S. history illuminates the relevance of these women in the development of U.S. society and culture. The collection traces the development of black women's voices from the late 19th century to the present day. Covering both well-known and lesser-known individuals, Bury My Heart in a Free Land gives voice to the passion and clarity of thought of black women intellectuals on various arenas in American life-from the social sciences, history, and literature to politics, education, religion, and art. The essays address a broad range of outstanding black women that include preachers, abolitionists, writers, civil rights activists, and artists. A section entitled "Black Women Intellectuals in the New Negro Era" highlights black women intellectuals such as Jessie Redmon Fauset and Elizabeth Catlett and offers new insights on black women who have been significantly overlooked in American intellectual history. Represents a standout volume on the subject of black women intellectuals in modern U.S. history that covers figures from the late 19th century to the present Includes well-known individuals, such as Ida B. Wells and Toni Morrison, as well as lesser-known black women intellectuals, such as Wanda Coleman Provides contributions from various experts in the field

The surprisingly hopeful story of how a straight, nonpromiscuous, everyday girl contracted HIV and how she manages to stay upbeat, inspired, and more positive about life than ever before

At nineteen years of age, Marvelyn Brown was lying in a stark white hospital bed at Tennessee Christian Medical Center, feeling hopeless. A former top track and basketball athlete, she was in the best shape of her life, but she was battling a sudden illness in the intensive care unit. Doctors had no idea what was going on. It never occurred to Brown that she might be HIV positive.

Having unprotected sex with her Prince Charming had set into swift motion a set of circumstances that not only landed her in the fight of her life, but also alienated her from her community. Rather than give up, however, Brown found a reason to fight and a reason to live.

The Naked Truth is an inspirational memoir that shares how an everyday teen refused to give up on herself, even as others would forsake her. More, it's a cautionary tale that every parent, guidance counselor, and young adult should read.

This book explores the role of advertising and the consumption that it promotes in changing cultural perceptions of sex and femininity across the Balkan region. Ibroscheva theorizes how the marketing of gender identities that has taken place in the years of the post-socialist transition has fundamentally affected the social, economic, and political positioning of women. Advertising is one of the major factories of cultural signification, and as such serves as the most ubiquitous vessel of global norms of gendered selves. In addition, advertising serves as a literacy tool for learning the grammar of consumption, studying the ideologies of femininity and sex before and after the collapse of the socialist project, as well as the prevailing portrayals of femininity in advertising in present day Bulgaria. This study provides a revealing look at the mechanisms of how post-socialist norms of desired and accepted sexual behavior are being engendered, and specifically, what role do media play in this transformative process.

An enchanting 1940Us adventure of Connee in her childhood summer resort home and Sally, daughter of the wealthy cottage owners. Loneliness juxtaposed with hilarious escapades will fill tweenagers to keenagers with sadness and delight. Features 25 illustrations by Wendel Norton.

In From Out of the Shadows, historian Vicki L. Ruiz provides the first full study of Mexican-American women in the 20th century, in a narrative that is greatly enhanced by Ruiz's skillful use of interviews and personal stories, capturing a vivid sense of the Mexicana experience in the United States. For this new edition, Ruiz includes a preface that continues the story of the Mexicana experience in the United States, as well as the growth of the field of Latina history.
The book begins with the first wave of Mexican women crossing the border from Mexico early in our century. She reveals that between 1910 and 1930, over one million Mexican men and women (perhaps as much as ten percent of Mexico's population) migrated "al otro lado." Ruiz illuminates attempts to Americanize the Mexicanas, especially by Protestant groups, whose efforts by and large failed; the women instead relied on their own community groups--mutualistas (mutual aid societies), parish organizations, auxiliaries, and labor unions--to help them assimilate. We also read about the tensions that arose between generations, as the parents tried to rein in young daughters eager to adopt American ways--forbidding the use of makeup and insisting that teenage girls attend a dance, a movie, or even a church function with a chaperone, usually their mothers. Perhaps most important, the book highlights the various forms of political protest initiated by Mexican-American women, including civil rights activity and protests against the war in Vietnam.
What emerges from the book finally is a portrait of a very distinctive culture in America, one that has slowly gathered strength in the last 95 years. From Out of the Shadows is animportant addition to the largely undocumented history of Mexican-American women in our century.

Throughout all of her life's experiences, author Angela Michelle has learned that both happiness and suffering are ubiquitous. In "Choice," she shares a compilation of journal entries and narratives discussing some of her life's most intense moments: being beaten nearly to death; having paranormal dreams and hearing voices validated by God; experiencing the brutal murder of her father; enduring flashbacks of childhood molestation; being raped in her own home; suffering through a frightening pregnancy and childbirth; and receiving visits from angels.

This memoir shares her thoughts and feelings as she moved through life, facing her fears and learning from all of her experiences. Choice narrates how she discovered there was a purpose for and a lesson learned from each event-a challenge to overcome and a new direction to follow.

Filled with emotion, "Choice" not only tells the story of Angela Michelle and how she faced her crazy life, but also serves to show that, through both the good and the bad, life has purpose.

When the Germans invaded her small Belgian village in 1914, Marthe Cnockaert's home was burned and her family separated. After getting a job at a German hospital, and winning the Iron Cross for her service to the Reich, she was approached by a neighbor and invited to become an intelligence agent for the British. Not without trepidation, Cnockaert embarked on a career as a spy, providing information and engaging in sabotage before her capture and imprisonment in 1916. After the war, she was paid and decorated by a grateful British government for her service. Cnockaert's is only one of the surprising and gripping stories that comprise Female Intelligence. This is the first history of the female spies who served Britain during World War I, focusing on both the powerful cultural images of these women and the realities, challenges, and contradictions of intelligence service. Between the founding of modern British intelligence organizations in 1909 and the demobilization of 1919, more than 6,000 women served the British government in either civil or military occupations as members of the intelligence community. These women performed a variety of services, and they represented an astonishing diversity of nationality, age, and class. From Aphra Behn, who spied for the British government in the seventeenth century, to the most well known example, Mata Hari, female spies have a long history, existing in juxtaposition to the folkloric notion of women as chatty, gossipy, and indiscreet. Using personal accounts, letters, official documents and newspaper reports, Female Intelligence interrogates different, and apparently contradictory, constructions of gender in the competing spheres of espionage activity.

Was she a selfless political activist? A feminist heroine? A gifted writer who rose from poverty to become a leading journalist and author of the cult classic Daughter of Earth? A spy for the Soviet Union? Or all of these things?
Drawing on fifteen years of intensive research and unprecedented access to previously unpublished documents, this vibrant book brings to life one of the twentieth century's most fascinating women. Ruth Price traces Agnes Smedley's unlikely trajectory from a small Missouri town to the coal country of Colorado; to Berkeley and Greenwich Village; to Berlin, Moscow, and China. Fueled by a fury at injustice, Smedley threw herself headlong into the crucial issues of the time, from Indian independence to birth control, women's rights, and the revolution in China. Her friends included such figures as Margaret Sanger, Langston Hughes, Emma Goldman, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mao Zedong, and many others. Perhaps most important, Price uncovers an astonishing truth: Smedley, long thought to be the unfair target of a Cold War smear campaign, was indeed guilty of the espionage charges leveled against her by General Douglas MacArthur and others. Smedley worked to foment armed revolution in India and gathered intelligence for the Soviet Union, seeing it as a bulwark against fascism. Price argues that Smedley acted out of a passionate idealism and that she exhibited a courage and compassion worthy of a renewed, if more complicated, admiration today.
Epic in scope, painstakingly researched, and unflinchingly honest, The Lives of Agnes Smedley offers a stunning reappraisal of one of America's most controversial Leftists and a new look at the troubled historical terrain of the first half of the twentieth century.

Award winning internationally recognized U.S. fashion designer, Agatha Brown, was born in Texas and graduated Southern Methodist University Fashion School of Design. Known in the fashion world simply as "Agatha," she chronicles her very free spirited, adventurous, and glamorous life. From very humble beginnings and growing up during the Great Depression, she overcame all obstacles to reach the top in her career. Her adventurous travels alone took her to Italy and France to design and produce her collections, and a dangerous trip to Israel three weeks after the Six Day War will keep the reader entranced. In her travels, she meets many fascinating people and celebrities, both the famous and infamous. Her adventures in the Far East and exotic Hong Kong are wildly exciting and her trip to Brazil almost cost her life. Finally, she meets her soul mate, and opens her own company at 550 Seventh Avenue in New York. At the pinnacle of her career, events bring it all crashing down and she starts all over again from the island paradise of Aruba. Her autobiography tells it all. The great successes, the downfalls, the hot passionate love affairs, the heartbreaks, and the adventures that challenge her indomitable free spirit are all here in this thrilling read. Member New York Fashion Council; Named "Guest Designer" Dallas Fashion Mart 1986; Nominated "Best Designer" Mohair Council of America 1985; "Best of Fall" for fragrance "Mystery of Agatha" awarded by www.ashford.com 2000; "Best of 2002" award for fragrances "Imperial Jade Empress and Emperor" by www.lucire.com

View the Table of Contents.
Read the Introduction.

"Lively tales of girls who long for the lives of male scholars, and rebels who visit strip clubs, smoke pot, and dream of high-powered careers."--"Books to Watch out For"

"Stephanie Levine's book is full of surprises."--"Midstream"

"A fascinating read for anyone interested in youth culture."
--"Youth Today"

"In an era seemingly plagued with sex, anorexia and depression among our nation's girls, a page from "Mystics, Mavericks, and Merrymakers" is a refreshing peek into the possibilities for growth, strength and self."--"The Jewish New Weekly of Northern California"

"At all times, Levine's genuine respect for the community shines through. The book is eminently readable and undoubtedly fascinating."--"Jewish Chronicle"

"A vivid portrayal of the Lubavitcher community."
--" Library Journal"

"[Levine's] empathy is palpable in each one of the profiles. Levine has a natural, artful style and writes with a lively and keen vision."
--"Moment magazine"

"Her findings are fascinating."
--"Jewish Telegraph"

"Levine treats all her subjects with respect. At the core, this is a popularly written academic study."
-- "KLIATT"

"Levine vividly portrays these girls, their hopes and their struggles, as well as her own feelings towards Orthodoxy and the Lubavitch way of life."
--"JOFA Book Corner"

"Levine's portraits provide a cross-section of the very human faces of these ultra-religious girls."
--"New Jersey Times"

"Stephanie Wellen Levine's suggestions are obviously heartfelt and perhaps sensible....at turns charming and scandalous."
--"The Jerusalem Report"

"Levine takes readersinto an unfamiliar world of girls who were raised in the Lubavitcher sect of Hasidim in Crown Heights, Brooklyn...One intriguing paradox she explores is how these girls created distinct personalities while living in a very closed society."
--"Choice"

"Levine does a splendid job of presenting how the girls cope, and paints vivid pictures of Shabbat around their family tables."
--" The Jerusalem Post Literary Quarterly"

"Stephanie Wellen Levine has written an intriguing and joyous account of the lives of young adult Hasidic women."
--" Jewish Book World"

"Eminently readable."
--" Jewish Journal Book Review"

"Levine steps back and lets the girls speak for themselves; their voices, layered with determination, yearning, confusion and wonder, emerge clearly."
--" Na'amat Woman Book Reviews"

"This absorbing ethnography acts as one subculture's corrective to "Reviving Ophelia," in that it offers a refreshing portrait of adolescent girls who are far from insecure."--"Publishers Weekly" (starred review)

From the ardently religious young woman who longs for the life of a male scholar to the young rebel who visits a strip club, smokes pot, and agonizes over her loss of faith to the proud Lubavitcher with a desire for a high-powered career, Stephanie Wellen Levine provides a rare glimpse into the inner worlds and daily lives of these Hasidic girls.

Lubavitcher Hasidim are famous for their efforts to inspire secular Jews to become more observant and for their messianic fervor. Strict followers of Orthodox Judaism, they maintain sharp gender-role distinctions.

Levine spent a year living in the Lubavitch community of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, participating in the rhythms of Hasidic girlhood. Drawing on many intimate hours among Hasidim and over 30 in-depth interviews, Mystics, Mavericks, and Merrymakers offers rich portraits of individual Hasidic young women and how they deal with the conflicts between the regimented society in which they live and the pull of mainstream American life.

This superbly crafted book offers intimate stories from Hasidic teenagers' lives, providing an intriguing twist to a universal theme: the struggle to grow up and define who we are within the context of culture, family, and life-driving beliefs.

Through the changing mores of American society, we have become tolerant of non-traditional families and flexible gender roles. When families experience the trauma of divorce, they have to adapt the best they can to altered economic and social circumstances. And while we smile indulgently at the concept of "Mr.Mom," the bumbling father who gamely throws himself into the difficult tasks of homemaking and nurturing children, we still harshly judge the mother who, for whatever reason, has relinquished or lost custody of her children. For many, that woman is a modern-day Medea; perceived to have sacrificed her children to satisfy her own selfish wants and needs. Non-custodial mothers and their image in society are the subject of this in-depth, compassionate study by Annette Mayo Pagano, Ph.D. Through a series of revealing interviews, Dr. Pagano examines the lives of nine women from all walks of life who redefine the role of mother in this non-traditional context.