*WINNER! 2019 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year* Are there moments in your life when your femaleness is a source of power or hardship? When does your voice ring its clearest? When have you been silenced? Feminine Rising: Voices of Power and Invisibility brings together international poets and essayists, both award-winning and emergent, to answer these questions with raw, honest meditations that speak to women of all races, nationalities, and sexual orientations. It is an anthology of unforgettable stories both humorous and frightening, inspirational and sensual, employing traditional poetry and prose alongside exciting experimental forms. Feminine Rising celebrates women’ s differences, while embracing the source of their sameness— the unique experience of womanhood. ''Searing nonfiction and poetry pieces are collected in Feminine Rising , an anthology presented in the wake of #MeToo that looks back through decades, revealing how little, and how much, has changed. ''Selections gather under seven themes, including 'the body and sex' and 'silence and subversion', that are useful entries for classroom discussion. The sharpest selections bridge multiple themes. Work from emerging and established writers presses on through triumphs and trauma, gratitude and regret. Often, its candor is rooted in the body's potential and violation. Topics include misogyny in midcentury academia, coming of age in the seventies, Gen X divorce, and campus rape. All-too-common experiences are unsettling even as they reaffirm the necessity of storytelling. ''In the masterful 'Ice Fight,' Ann Pancake weighs an Appalachian upbringing against the realization that finding wholeness won't happen at home. In 'Puberty Enchiladas,' Kali Lightfoot braids the newfound separateness and joy of teenage friendships with future knowledge of loss. Maggie Thach Morshed's 'A Piece of Land' examines her Vietnamese mother's sacrifices. ''These and other essays anchor the book, displaying a subtler, multistrand dexterity that is less prevalent in the book's poems, many of which come down to conclusive and emotional, but expected, points. Exceptions include Andrena Zawinski's 'After My Mother's Death', a poem in which the act of stripping a bed funnels through time to achieve a haunting final image, and Lois Roma-Deeley's 'Apologizing for the Rain', an incisive look at the blame that women take and the expectations placed on them to answer for other people's problems. '' Feminine Rising embraces less frequently heard voices, including those of rural and working women, and does what the best anthologies do: builds force through its collective wave. For all the pain here, there's solace in the book's very act of reinvigorating an ongoing conversation.' --Karen Rigby (May/June 2019) Foreword Reviews EDITORS BIOGRAPHIES: Andrea Fekete is granddaughter to Mexican and Hungarian immigrants and a native of the southern West Virginia coalfields. She grew up a West Virginia holler girl who loved to write but with no idea if anyone would read girls' work, especially work by holler girls. But she'd go on to university at nineteen and discover women's studies, feminism, and literature by women of all races, nationalities, and religions. She holds an MA in English from Marshall University and an MFA in Creative Writing from WV Wesleyan College. She is author of an historical fiction novel of the West Virginia coal mine wars of 1920, Waters Run Wild (2010), and of one poetry chapbook, I Held a Morning (2012). Her fiction and poetry often appear in journals such as Chiron Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Kentucky Review, Montucky Review, Adirondack Review, and ABZ, She is a contributor to the anthology Eyes Glowing at the Edge of the Woods: Fiction and Poetry from West Virginia (2017), among others.Lara Lillibridge sings offbeat and dances off-key. She writes a lot, and sometimes even likes how it turns out. Lara is a graduate of West Virginia Wesleyan College's MFA program in Creative Nonfiction. In 2016, she won Slippery Elm Literary Journal's Prose Contest, and the American Literary Review's Contest in Nonfiction. She also was a finalist in both Black Warrior Review's Nonfiction Contest and DisQuiet's Literary Prize in Creative Nonfiction. Her memoir Girlish: Growing Up in a Lesbian Home was published in 2018 with Skyhorse. She has had essays published in Salon, Hippocampus, Crab Fat Magazine, Luna Luna, Huffington Post, The Feminist Wire, Airplane Reading, Thirteen Ways to Tell a Story, Weirderary, and Brain, Child Magazine's Brain, Mother blog. Some of her essays can be found in the anthologies Tallish, Raised by Unicorns, and In Season.AUTHOR HOME : Fekete: Charleston, WV; Lillibridge: Lakewood, OH