Folger Shakespeare Library Releases Limited-Edition Anthology

Thirteen women poets and authors—among them, former U.S. poets laureate Rita Dove and Maxine Kumin and Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Jane Smiley—respond to the works of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century women writers in this elegantly designed, handbound chapbook. This limited-edition, collectible anthology will be available in January 2012 from the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Editors Gigi Bradford and Louisa Newlin see the book's contemporary contributors as engaging, in part, in a "literary conversation" across the centuries with these earlier writers. The modern-day women poets and novelists in Shakespeare's Sisters, they write, "are far from silent and obedient. Their voices ring out loud and clear."

Among those voices:

• Jane Smiley, whose story "Marguerite, Queen of Navarre, Gives Desdemona Advice," reimagines Othello in letters between sixteenth-century writers Marguerite de Navarre and Vittoria Colonna and Shakespeare's Desdemona
• Rita Dove, on the future Elizabeth I, writing with a diamond on a window while confined at a lodge at the direction of her sister, Mary I
• Rosanna Warren, who urges the sixteenth-century poet Mary Sidney, creator of stunningly varied Psalm translations, to "translate us too"
• Maxine Kumin, in "Sonnets Uncorseted," on the prolific seventeenth-century poet and author Margaret Cavendish
• Elizabeth Nunez, on echoes of past literary salons in her grandmother's and other women's "Bloomsbury groups" in 1940s to 1960s Trinidad
• And still more from Elizabeth Alexander, Eavan Boland, Linda Gregerson, Jane Hirshfield, Marie Howe, Heather McHugh, Jacqueline Osherow, and Linda Pastan

Shakespeare's Sisters takes its title from a passage in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929) in which Woolf pictures an imaginary sister of William Shakespeare—his equal in talent, yet silenced by the social restrictions of his day. Recent scholarship has shown that, although women of Shakespeare's time faced great obstacles, some produced a wealth of written works. "Those who did write," conclude Bradford and Newlin, "deserve our heartfelt admiration and respect." It is these early modern women writers to whom the works in this chapbook respond.

Shakespeare's Sisters: Women Writers Bridge Five Centuries was inspired by the exhibition Shakespeare's Sisters: Voices of English and European Women Writers 1500–1700 (February 2–May 20, 2012), a part of "Celebrating 1000 Years of Women Writers," a project of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Bradford and Newlin have also taught the Shakespeare's Sisters seminar for local students at the Folger since 1999.  Newlin created, directed, and taught the seminar through 2006; since then, Bradford has directed and taught it with Folger Poetry and Lectures Coordinator Teri Cross Davis.

Edited by Gigi Bradford and Louisa Newlin
52 pages, hand-sewn binding, letterpress-printed cover, softbound, $19.99
ISBN: 978-0-9629254-4-3

Available January 2012 www.folger.edu/shop