How do women writers cope with changes and juggle the demands in their already full lives to make time for their lives as artists? In this anthology, noted female novelists, journalists, essayists, poets, and nonfiction writers address the old and new challenges of "doing it all" that face women writers as the twenty-first century approaches. With eloquence, sensitivity, and more than a touch of wry humor, Sleeping with One Eye Open relates positive stories from women who lead effective lives as artists, emphasizing how sources of inspiration, discipline, resourcefulness, and determination help them succeed despite the obstacle of "no time.

In this rich and diverse collection, three dozen 20th-century writers muse about their experiences in and observations of America. Though the essays are organized in rough chronological fashion, some emphasize place (Barbara Grizzuti Harrison on Bensonhurst, Michael Stephens on Hawaii), others identity (Richard Rodriguez on language, Eva Hoffman on "postmodern uncertainty"), others the immigrant experience (Bharati Mukherjee) or the changing times (Joan Didion on the 1960s, James Farmer on the civil rights movement). Some Americans must leave home to find insights (June Jordan in the Bahamas), while some non-Americans come here to observe, such as the Palestinian Anton Shammas (who sees the country as big enough to contain the "portable homelands" brought by immigrants). Amidst the play of ideas and emotions surrounding ethnicity and identity, essays by Wendell Berry and Gretel Ehrlich celebrate the enduring truths of the land.

During an era of extreme Sinophobia, the Eurasian Sui Sin Far (1865-1914) courageously wrote of the Chinese in North America as humorous, tragic, charming, and loving-in short, as human. Her stories sympathetically portrayed a group caught between worlds, inheritors of traditional Chinese values who found themselves thrust into booming mercantile and extremely race-conscious cities like San Francisco, Seattle, New York, and Montreal at the turn of the last century. Amy Ling and Annette White-Parks select from Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1914) two dozen of the author's finest stories, including "In the Land of the Free," "The Story of One White Woman Who Married a Chinese," "Her Chinese Husband," and "The Wisdom of the New." They also delve into Children's stories like "The Story of a Little Chinese Seabird" and "What about the Cat?" A second section offers previously uncollected writings, including journalism and fiction that appeared in the Montreal Daily Witness, Los Angeles Express, New York Independent, The Westerner, and New England Magazine. The final piece, "Sui Sin Far, the Half Chinese Writer, Tells of Her Career," was printed in the Boston Globein 1912, two years before her death.

Thirty-six writers of diverse racial and cultural backgrounds explore the specific tensions of being American with roots in another culture and also address historical moments which have defined American life during this century the battle at Wounded Knee, the Second World War, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War, among them. Powerful, first-person accounts, they follow different paths. But each one is driven by the deep need to bear witness and to bring coherence to personal and collective experience. The contributors are: James Baldwin, Wendell Berry, Carlos Bulosan, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Joan Didion, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Alexander Eastman, Gretel Ehrlich, James Farmer, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Mary Gordon, Vivian Gornick, Jessica Hagedon, Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, Eva Hoffman, June Jordan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Kim Yong Ik, Ron Kovic, Paule Marshall, Pablo Medina, N. Scott Momaday, Bharati Mukherjee, Geoffrey O'Brien, Gregory Orfalea, Sonia Pilcer, Mario Puzo, Jonathan Raban, Adrienne Rich, Richard Rodriguez, Anton Shammas, Monica Stone, Gary Soto, Michael Stephens, Sui Sin Far, and Anzia Yezierska. Visions of America is the nonfiction companion to Imagining America: Stories from the Promised Land, also edited by Wesley Brown and Amy Ling.