Women Authors From The United States

"Born in 1957, Bonnie has enjoyed a successful career as a copywriter and creative director, before turning her hand to fiction. Raised in California she left the US to live first in Geneva and then in London as her husband’s job moved from city to city. In fact it was her arrival in London and the need to get out and make friends that led her to joining a creative writing group. From there she found the confidence to try her hand once more at getting published. This time, she landed an agent — and not just any agent but Felicity Blunt of no less, sister of Hollywood star and wife of actor , and more importantly, one of the best in the business."

"Any awareness of how lies spread must generate a real sensitivity to the fact that most lies believed to be white are unnecessary if not downright undesirable."

"Act only on the maxim whereby thou canst at the same time will that it should become a universal law."

"Fight Like Hell establishes Kim Kelly as a true champion for the working class."

"No one is more passionate about workers' struggles than Kim Kelly, and it shows."

"Kim Kelly vibrantly brings struggles and sacrifices of badass working-classs heroes to life and we need to hear these voices now more than ever"

"From the moment I read Kim's work the first time, I knew Mother Jones would have loved her...By the time Kim made waves in the labor movement with her piece "Everything You Need to Know about General Strikes," I was hooked...She has a writer's intellectual curiosity and a reporter's nose for the truth, and it shows in this book...While there are many who wish we would forget, Kim's thrilling and incisive look at our history reminds us of a fundamental truth: the labor movement belongs to all of us."

"None of us is an island, and every labor story is also a disability story, a queer story, a Black story, a women’s story. We’re all in this together because ultimately everyone either is a worker or was a worker or will be a worker at some point in their life. There have been efforts over the decades and centuries to separate workers on the basis of race, gender, nationality, or ability, and that’s always been bullshit. It’s just a boss’s tactic to keep us apart because when we come together, we’re strong."

"Sex workers have always been a vital part of the labor movement and are often left out of the conversation just because of what their job is or where they came from or where they’re living. There’s so much that organized labor can learn from sex-worker organizers because they’ve had to deal with all the same bullshit that any other worker deals with—horrible wages, bad bosses, unsafe working conditions, labor laws that don’t work for them—on top of the stigma and the whore phobia and ignorance and prejudice around their work. If we’re going to stand up for workers and cover workers’ stories and say, “We care about workers,” we need to care about all workers. An injury to one needs to be an injury to all."

"(How are you feeling about the future of the labor movement?) I am so stoked, man. I am so proud of us, and I’m so certain that we’re going to win. It’s going to take struggle and time, and things aren’t where they should be yet, but they used to be way worse. We’re in a position where more people are interested in unions and organizing and taking their power back. That is nothing if not its own revolution."

"I love telling people about the time when a group of disabled activists got tired of waiting for the government to actually enact regulations that were part of the 1977 Rehabilitation Act and occupied a bunch of federal buildings around the country."

"Earlier on in the pandemic, there was such a contrast between the workers who had to keep going to work even before we had vaccines [and those who didn’t]; they had to keep going out and delivering food or making food or cleaning streets or doing all this essential labor that was momentarily recognized as essential work. We had a hot minute where some people got a couple extra dollars that they badly needed and some people got cheered on from the window—all that weird appreciation theater. And then all that went away, and the workers still had to keep going to work. I think there’s been that shift in the way a lot of workers see their lives, their labor, the value they are bringing to society and their employers, and what they’re getting back in return—and the math ain’t math-ing there."

"Unions still exist, and they’re an option, and they’re a great way to build power with your coworkers. On top of all that, we saw and are continuing to see workers at Amazon and Starbucks—these incredibly well-known corporations that I think a lot of people have accepted as being part of the fabric of their daily lives—go up against the bosses and say, “We need more from you, because you are literally hanging out in space while we’re trying to pay our rent.”"

"Kim Kelly has written the most important book on labor published in a generation"

"he (my father) instilled in me the unshakable idea that the union was a good thing to have and that when your boss was doing you wrong, you could count on the union to have your back. Every worker deserves to feel that way (p. xxiv)"

"Honesty from health professionals matters more to patients than almost everything else that they experience when ill."

"the history of labor struggles in health care, education, media, sports, and nonprofit work have shaped our world in incalculably important ways, and have been brilliantly covered by authors like Sarah Jaffe, Maximillian Alvarez, Gabriel Winant, Micah Uetricht, Britni de la Cretaz, Elizabeth Catte, Steven Greenhouse, and many others."

"... I was interested in the different ways that the world has treated men and women. And I wanted to look at that in the context of a marriage."

"We learn from each other’s stories"

"... I shouldn't write a novel to keep up with every event."

"When I was a child, I learned two types of history-the one at home and the one at school."

"... when I was a child, I used to tell myself ... serial novels in my head. I had a novel that I told myself, on the way to school, about the two heirs to the Kraft cheese fortune. ... I think it's because ... my mother, busy writing, gave us a lot of Kraft macaroni and cheese."

"We live in a world where you could go for the rest of your life never reading a book — after school. And that to me is a sad fate ... because books hold so much."

"Situating one's politics, indeed one's very life, toward community empowerment was a given among Chicano student activists."

"Dr. Ruiz has taught me the first rule of service: It is not enough to achieve on one’s own. We must always reach out and help those around us and especially those that come after us."

"Building community is both a legacy and a responsibility. As a storyteller, listener, recorder, and amateur theorist, I am reminded of a passage in Eudora Welty's Becoming a Writer: "Each of us is moving, changing, and with respect to others. As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge.""

"To my knowledge, there are only seventeen Chicanas with PhDs in history. I am number four. Often we labor alone, subject to "proving" our research and our very presence in the academy. I would like to acknowledge the labors of Louise Kerr, Raquel Casas, Antonia Castañeda, Miroslava Chávez, Deena González, Camille Guerin Gonzáles, Lara Medina, Gloria Miranda, María Montoya, Lorena Oropeza, Cynthia Orozco, Emma Pérez, Naomi Quiñonez, Yolanda Romero, Elizabeth Salas, and Shirlene Soto and to honor the legacies of the late Irene Ledesma and Magdalena Mora."

"Growing up in northwest Florida during the 1960s and 1970s brought lessons about the complications of being a mixed-heritage person, neither black nor white, in the Deep South. In the newly integrated junior high school, African American students sat on one side, white students on the other, and Vicki in the middle. Her position in the social hierarchy was conveyed by anonymous notes slipped into her handbag bearing racial epithets or saying she would be better liked if she claimed to be Italian."

"Successful union organization depends, in large measure, on a sense of solidarity and community among workers."

"we’re not in a post racial state. Race is still a very important part of how all of us – globally – live our lives. African-Americans and Latinos need to get together, create change that will benefit not just Latinos and African-Americans but all people of color."

"The way ideology is constructed in Latin America –if you claim Blackness or talk about race, it’s because you have some kind of complex; you just can’t seem to deal with the world the way it is. It’s a good way of silencing any kind of protest against discrimination because people think you’re saying because you have a problem, it’s your personal problem not collective discrimination."

"Whether we look at race as a fixed notion or culturally constructed concept it is very real. Race itself is an invention, a creation. Many people feel race is something that’s fixed, rigid and doesn’t have variances. By looking at Afro-Latinos, you kind of get a better sense of how fluid race has been. People have constructed it in different ways depending on conditions and circumstances."

"This kind of book should have been around when I was a kid because blackness was equated with being African-American. This limited view left me concerned about my blackness because I grew up as a Black Puerto Rican and I’m very conscious how race and ethnicity have both impacted my life."

"("Are there any countries working to acknowledge the historical and cultural impact of their African roots?") Every single country in Latin America and the Caribbean is doing that, including places you would never imagine like Chile and Uruguay and Paraguay, all have Black advocacy organizations. The only exception is El Salvador. And I think we can contribute some of the reluctance to organizing to El Salvador’s civil war. The political instability works against organizing."

"struggling for racial equality [in Latin America] is far behind the United States."

"In Latin America there is this general concept that because we are all racially mixed, somewhere back in everybody’s family tree there is an African or Indian then we are incapable of being racist because that would be being racist against ourselves. Since most of these countries became independent that has become the guiding line that we are all mixed and because we are all mixed we cannot be racist."

"We keep denying the importance of race because white people are becoming the minority."

"Afro-Latinos serve as bridges. The most obvious example would be Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. The Schomburg Center for Black Culture [Harlem, New York, USA] is probably the premiere institution for any type of serious scholarship and research on Africans and their descendants. Schomburg was a Black Puerto Rican who came to the United States from Puerto Rico in 1891 at 17. He became an integral part of the Black community – African American and Caribbean; most definitely he served as a bridge. Most of his writings were about Black Latinos, whether in Spain, the Caribbean or South America."

"We are not only what we are today but what we were yesterday and if you burn your immediate past there is nothing left but ashes which are all very well for those heads that like nothing better than to be sprinkled with ashes. But are these ash-covered heads really the spokesmen of our conscience?"

"Guilt is real, it is serious, but when it becomes also a fashion, there is corruption."

"Roving was good for the writer; to have been a reporter undoubtedly informed Ring Lardner, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Crane. To know far more than he may ever use is imperative for the writer."

"Writing should be dangerous: as dangerous as Socrates. There should be no refuge for the writer either in the Ivory Tower or the Social Church."

"In the process of putting the book together, we discovered a whole series of people who were identified as being African-American because they appeared—Black. There was no real attention to their [Latino] ethnicity even if they spoke Spanish; they served as bridges. Afro-Latinos function in two worlds: African [Black] and Latino."

"It takes a true writer to show us what has been missing in our lives. No one can give the writer an assignment that his own impulse has not bespoken but more than his security should inform him. "The pen," said Kafka to Janouch, "is not an instrument but an organ of the writer's.""

"The great authors to come up since the Second World War have mostly been dead a long time. Kafka, Melville, Hawthorne, Henry James should be with us always but their resurgence in the forties presaged more than recognition of their stature. It signified also a genteel retreat from a period too complicated to confront easily. The writings of the detached past became a kind of smokescreen to conceal the present dilemma, and the ruins. But a ruin can be as good a point of departure as any. There is usually new life in the ruins as anyone who ever saw a population react from a bombing can testify. But the picker-uppers are not trying to salvage tender mementos only. They usually are looking for bricks and firewood."

"Literary epochs come and go but this wave seems to have frozen in the cold war."

"Tiphanie Yanique's writing is like a warm embrace from a wise and insightful friend."

"It is not only a question of whether the American way of life is superior, but whether the American way of life is sustainable. Can we really continue to exploit the resources of the Caribbean for our own benefit without consequences?"

"People often forget that they too are subject to the whims of the sea, that their flesh and bone can be pulled down and swallowed up just like anything else. But the sea remembers. It remembers everything, from the smallest broken shell to the largest sunken ship."

"Tiphanie Yanique's voice is a siren song, pulling you in with its beauty and urgency, and leaving you transformed.""