The writers featured range in age from fourteen to over eighty, and reflect a rich diversity of race, ethnicity, and background. In addition to work by literary icons such as Maya Angelou, Fay Chiang, Sandra Cisneros, Mary Gordon, Jamaica Kincaid, Thomas Lux, Honor Moore, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Alix Kates Shulman, and Barbara Probst Solomon, Girls: An Anthology introduces writers whose work appears here in print for the first time. Among these are a Holocaust survivor, Tony award-winner Donna Murphy, a teenage mother who herself is in foster care, a psychiatrist, and a prison inmate.
Girls explores and celebrates–for the first time really–what it is to be a girl growing up in our culture. The fifty voices heard in this collection evoke the extraordinary range and complexity of this experience, and in the process redefine our traditional notions of girlhood.
Through memoirs, stories, poems, essays, letters, and interviews, girls describe their triumphs and losses, heartaches and joys. They speak as mothers, sisters, daughters, and friends–about themselves and each other. Also included are two fathers’ perspectives on their relationships to their daughters.
Their recorded journeys offer valuable lessons for future as well as current generations. Above all, Girls: An Anthology gives girls everywhere their own voice.
