By Terese Svoboda | On March 24, 2018 | Updated August 24, 2022 | Comments (0)
Lola Ridge (born Rose Emily Ridge (December 12, 1873 – May 19, 1941) was an Irish-American radical poet and editor.
“Anything that burns you” was the advice she gave English critic Alice Hunt Bartlett when she asked what poets should be writing in 1925. “I write about something that I feel intensely. How can you help writing about something you feel intensely?”
The New York Times declared her “one of America’s best poets” when she died, but her interest in radicalism, feminism, and experimental poetry wrote her out of literary history. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On March 22, 2018 | Updated August 17, 2022 | Comments (1)
Lydia Maria Francis Child (February 11, 1802 – October 20, 1880) was a prolific American author, social reformer, journalist, and abolitionist.
Born in Medford, Massachusetts, she was educated despite the disapproval of her father, a baker, who thought she ought not to read at all.
But Lydia’s appetite for learning was voracious, and the books she devoured were supplied primarily by her brother Convers Francis, who later became a Unitarian minister and professor at Harvard Divinity School. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On March 20, 2018 | Updated October 6, 2026 | Comments (5)
Zora Neale Hurston (January 7, 1891 – January 28, 1960), was a novelist, memoirist, and ethnographer best known for Their Eyes Were Watching God, her 1937 novel. (Photo at right by Carl Van Vechten.)
Her love of story would lead her not only to create her own, but to collect tales from the oral traditions of the African American South and the Black cultures of the Caribbean.
With her determined intelligence and irrepressible personality, she quickly became a big name in the Harlem Renaissance movement of the 1920s. She pursued a dual career as a writer (producing fiction, plays, and essays) and as an anthropologist.
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By Nava Atlas | On March 20, 2018 | Updated June 26, 2025 | Comments (2)
Harriet Beecher Stowe (June 14, 1811 – July 1, 1896), American author and abolitionist, is best known for the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
She grew up in a large, socially progressive family of ministers, authors, reformers, and educators who were well known in their time.
Among Harriet’s siblings were the prominent minister Henry Ward Beecher, and educator Catharine Beecher. She showed an early talent for writing and in her early twenties had a steadily paying profession, contributing articles to numerous publications. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On March 15, 2018 | Updated July 5, 2026 | Comments (0)
Nella Larsen (April 13, 1891 – March 30, 1964), born Nellie Walker in Chicago was an American author associated with the Harlem Renaissance movement. Her body of writing was modest, but she was considered a respected voice of her time.
Larsen was the first woman of color to graduate from library school and to receive the Guggenheim Fellowship for creative writing. The theme of her life, and in effect, her work, was a sense of never belonging — not to any community, nor even to an immediate family. Read More→
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