Women Authors From The United States

"Read (all kinds of writing, even the kind you don’t do), listen to music, go to art shows. There is such energy from creating and it’s important to feed all the senses."

"Have you located your passion as if this was your last night on earth?"

"A collaborative collection, “Dark Duet” of music inspired poetry written with Stephen M. Wilson, published by Necon E-Books 2012, was on the final ballot. This was a very special collection for me. Stephen approached me with the project and I was excited to work with him because he did poetry that made shapes on the page and I wanted to try something different. We worked seamlessly together and I’m extremely proud of this book. Unfortunately, Stephen died from cancer in 2013."

"When it came out I had the first book signing set for Sept 11, 2001 in Rockefeller Center in NYC. Yes, that day! I had the book propped up on my desk at my day job as a software developer. When that day came to an end I couldn’t even look at the cover. The first poem is called ‘Fire/Fight’, which I write years before 9/11 but suddenly was too relevant."

"My fourth HWA Bram Stoker award® was received in 2014 for “Four Elements” with Charlee Jacob, Marge Simon & Rain Graves, published by Bad Moon Book. The book has four sections for the four elements, Earth, Fire, Water and Air. Each of us picked an element, mine was Air which I wrote as a person who travels through time and space. I’ve known the other authors for years and it was a great honor working with them to create this collection."

"I didn’t realize then that I was the first Black award winner until someone bought it up and I looked back at the history of HWA Bram Stoker winners. One awesome thing that came out of winning was that my high school, Germantown HS, in Philadelphia asked me to speak at a graduation."

"I received the HWA Bram Stoker award® for “Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes”, a poetry collection published by Space & Time, with an introduction by one of my favorite authors, Charlee Jacob and cover by Colleen Crary, interior illustrations by Marge Simon."

"As NYC and I tried to find a new normal after the Towers were destroyed I slowly returned to my book. I was interviewed a couple of times about the book title and opening poem."

"I would say I’ve spent my whole life making up fairy tales, poetry, etc. I started writing to see myself in print when I was in high school. I had a couple of poems published in my high school magazine. Once I got out of college I started seriously submitting work (and collecting a good number of rejections), eventually the rejections became acceptances around 1994."

""I felt like the love of my life had just broken my heart." ([16:50])"

"I've always felt like this was my country. Please don't send me back." ([02:45])"

""The country that I love so much restored my faith and gave my sister a second chance." ([17:05])"

"We all cried and jumped for joy""

"I realized in no place else in the world would a story like this with an ending like that be possible other than the United States of America, the greatest nation in the world,"

"It was mind-blowing experience (to quote a cliche). I literally was so excited to be on the final ballot with people who were my heroes that it didn’t occur to me that I would actually win. The awards were in New York City so my mother came up from Philly for the awards banquet. It was amazing to receive it and have my mother there (she passed in 2009). She was my biggest supporter and it meant everything to me for her to see this great honoring. I could barely speak. I did get it together enough to make my mother stand up and wave to everyone. It’s one of my happiest memories."

"It’s a poetry collection I put together around the concept of transformation after destruction. There are three sections titled: Things Gone Bad, In Between, Transformation. The poems cover many kinds of loss and transformation, for example: a mother mourning a lost child, a lover loss of self, a revengeful lover, even a human losing their soul to a Voodoo Goddess."

"Everything around me, the news, my past, my hopes for the future, all the positive and negative things that humans do to each other and the planet. I moved from NYC in 2014 to Arizona and went from a city kid to being surrounded by mountains and nature. The mountains and desert have an overall settling effect on me which help me focus."

"For the first time, we have a critical mass of American Muslim women who are pioneering American Muslim culture"

"And so I believed,that these limitations were prescribed by Islam, and as a good Muslim girl, I should comply. The reward would be a picture-perfect life, which meant good grades, getting into a great college, marrying a wonderful man, having a baby within two years and then pursuing graduate school. I lived that illusion for many years."

"I just looked at her with this sadness...And she said, go. Just go. Go, go, go,"

"It was just incredible...I felt whole"

"There wasn’t a collection of American Muslim women’s writings across ethnic and ideological lines, These women don’t remember a time when they weren’t both American and Muslim, much unlike our parents, who were raised in other countries or in other faith traditions."

"I started making phone calls...I started calling Mogadishu, the airport" ([16:30])"

"Write, write, write. Write every day, even if only for a few minutes. I believe most writing happens in our subconscious so if we sit down each day the subconscious gets to know, ‘ah so I can show up now’ and it will pour out what it’s been mulling over."

"Once your work is as good as you can make it Send It Out! Don’t spend time wondering if it will be accepted or not, just get it out the house and start something new. If it comes back and you can make it better, do it. If you can’t make it better, Send It Out anyway. We writers are not the best judge of our work. For sure, your writing will get better the more you write, not necessarily rewriting the same piece."

"After “Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes” I was nominated for two collections that I wrote alone and won for both: “Being989336 Full of Light, Insubstantial”, which was 100 poems (Space & Time, 2007) & “How To Recognize A Demon Has Become Your Friend” a collection of short stories and poetry (Necon E-Books, 2011)."

"There's just so much that one person can take""

"In the absence of organized religion, faith abounds, in the form of song and art and food and strong arms"

"I often attribute my screenwriting to journalism because they drill in the who, what, when, where and why - but we really need to land on that why. That's what I've been exploring in my writing for many years and trying to get better at."

"Art replaces the light that is lost when the day fades, the moment passes, the evanescent extraordinary makes its quicksilver. Art tries to capture that which we know leaves us, as we move in and out of each other’s lives, as we all must eventually leave this earth. Great artists know that shadow, work always against the dying light, but always knowing that the day brings new light and that the ocean which washes away all traces on the sand leaves us a new canvas with each wave"

"One of the things that you see in many movements is that there is sort of a simplistic assumption that we must avoid, which is that progress moves forward in straight lines. And boy, does it ever not go in straight lines. It twists back, it doubles over itself. And it crosses many categories, such as economics, gender and race. That’s something that we may forget, and perhaps it goes against Dr. Martin Luther King’s precept that the arc of justice always bends forward"

"“friendship in marriage is its own thing: friendship in a cup of tea, or a glass of wine, or a cappuccino every Sunday morning. Friendship in buying undershirts and underpants. Friendship in picking up a prescription or rescuing the towed car. Friendship in waiting for the phone call after the mammogram. Friendship in toast buttered just so. Friendship in shoveling the snow. I am the one you want to tell. You are the one I want to tell"

"Can I add something about time? Clearly this year’s centennial is a significant landmark, but it’s not the only date we should be thinking of. The federal Voting Rights Act, which became law in 1965, was incredibly important too, because the passage of that legislation supposedly guaranteed the franchise to African-American women — since even after ratification of the 19th Amendment, stifling Jim Crow regulations throughout the South had kept the vote from women, as much as they did for Black men."

"Sometimes, we only get to know someone as one aspect of who they are. Then you start peeling back the layers and understanding more and more about who they are - their vulnerabilities, their fears, their joys, all those other words that equal humanity."

"Each spring the drowsy trill of the called us and armed with pails and strainers and home-made nets, off we started to the nearby railroad . Here we found treasures: strings of toad eggs, s big and little, sedate s (which we believed were lizards), and alluring s, drab , and most tempting of all, . Caddis flies had fascinated me ever since I had read about them Charles Kingsley's (1863), and it was wonderful to find that these almost mythical creatures of English brooks were our neighbors here in our own waters."

"The most cherished of my life came in 1895 — 's Bird-Craft (1895). For the first time, I had coloured bird pictures. Many of these were adapted from Audubon's (1827); single birds, or occasionally a pair, sometimes in surprising attitudes, were depicted. In later years, when looking at the reproductions of Audubon's original plates, every now and then a picture has given me a little tug at the heart, recalling my childhood years of eager search. The simple descriptions, the charming discussions, the enthusiastic introductory chapters of Bird-Craft — all these I pored over and all but learned by heart."

"Ornithological Margaret Morse Nice (1883–1974) changed the course of American through her two pioneering field studies in 1937 and 1943 on the . Although students of understand her importance, few general readers recognize her name, much less significance. There are many reasons this omission should be remedied: her outstanding professional accomplishments, her ability to balance family and career, her management of gender issues, and her work in conservation, preservation, and the ."

"Economics is really politics in disguise. We need to unpack the whole thing and say, 'Look, an economy is really nothing but a set of rules. Let's be up front about it. There's no actual science here.'"

"Most of our long-held beliefs about money, wealth, productivity and efficiency, and our notions of progress are rooted in immature, often infantile states of mind—easily manipulated by politicians and advertisers...Luckily, individuals learn faster than institutions and many people may already be ahead of their leaders.""

"If we can recognize that change and uncertainty are basic principles, we can greet the future and the transformation we are undergoing with the understanding that we do not know enough to be pessimistic."

"In teaching our child the English language, we talked to her as an adult except that our words were simple and concrete. In general our practice has been not to correct her mistakes, trusting to the force of good example. As much as possible we have tried to have her words stand for real things; for instance, we took her to see pigs and bears and skunks, so that she would not get her conceptions merely from stories, pictures and s. Finally we make an effort to avoid the dead level of too simple language by at times dealing with familiar situations in new words."

"The concept of territory proves to be as old as the science of ornithology, since Aristotle was the first writer to mention it. This was pointed out by Lack (Condor, 46, 1944:108) who, however, did not follow the subsequent history of these observations. ... It was Aristotle, then, who declared that eagles partition out the land according to their needs for food, and this statement was incorporated into the books of Pliny, (in regard to ), Albertus Magnus (transferred to vultures), , , and Buffon."

"Let the Rejections Roll in and Roll off"

"Some people may never discover who they are, and not knowing can be just as powerful as knowing"

"As a woman who's 50 and has a lot of jobs that I'm grateful for, I wanted to reflect that the American dream is still alive, that if you work very hard, opportunity will come your way, that you can be 50 and over and female in this country and still be relevant."

"I think the importance of having kids in the kitchen is to expose them to something beyond cookies and snacks. It’s like a dumbing down of a child’s palate. By associating the fun of cooking only with sweets, you’re limiting the child’s experience."

"You can make any food fun food."

"You would be surprised at how into cooking so many kids are today."

"Parents should encourage children as early as possible to begin safely using kitchen equipment."

"You can't put a cook next to a stove and not expect that two things are going to happen - cooking and talking."