Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born at her family’s homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts (nowadays the home of the Emily Dickinson Museum). She received her early education at a one-room primary school and later attended Amherst Academy. From an early age, she was troubled by the prospect of death, especially following the death of her second cousin and a close friend in 1844, resulting in her being sent to relatives in Boston to recuperate. After graduation, Dickinson went to study at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in South Hadley but returned home after only ten months. During her 20s, her mother suffered from various chronic illnesses, and Dickinson took on all domestic responsibilities and became more and more reclusive. 1855 was the last time Dickinson left her hometown when she traveled to Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia; afterward, she rarely left town and confined herself to her homestead and her brother’s house next door. She started writing poetry when she was 11 but received validation only when she was 18 when a family friend read her poems and encouraged her to write. In the sanctuary of her home, withdrawn from the outside world, Dickinson’s writing flourished; between 1858 to 1865, she had her most productive period, in which she wrote about 800 poems, making clean copies of her work and assembling them in 40 booklets, today known as her fascicles. During this period, Dickinson was corresponding with Samuel Bowles, the owner and editor-in-chief of the Springfield Republican, to whom she sent dozens of letters and nearly fifty poems, and he published a few of them in his newspaper. Dickinson also befriended the literary critic and radical abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson following an article he published in 1862 encouraging young writers to publish their work. In 1866, Dickinson’s solitude worsened, and she rarely left her homestead and even talked to her visitors through the door without seeing them. However, she was very expressive in her notes and letters to her family and friends. Although she continued to write poetry, her productivity declined, and she stopped assembling her work into the booklets. In 1874, her father died, and her mother suffered a stroke, and over the next few years, more friends and family members died, including her mother, nephew, and beloved dog. These occurrences affected Dickinson’s mental and physical health, and in November 1885, she had to be confined to her bed for several months until she died at 55. Though she wrote thousands of poems and letters, only ten were published during her life, most anonymously and some without her consent. A few years before she died, she made her sister Lavinia swear to burn her papers after her death. Lavinia kept her promise and burned most of Dickinson’s correspondence, but after she found a collection of about 1800 of her poems and recognized their worth, she set her mind to editing and publishing them. In 1890, four years after she died, Dickinson’s first collection was published and received critical and financial success. Her second collection was published the following year, running through five editions within two years. Since then, Dickinson’s work has remained continuously in print; but it wasn’t until 1955, with Thomas H. Johnson’s Dickinson’s Complete Poems, that her poems were published as they were initially written, without editing and altering. A fruitful writer throughout three decades, the themes of Dickinson’s poems changed over time. From conventional and sentimental in her early work, she became more versatile and wrote about various themes, including love, identity, life, death, and immortality, as in one of her most famous poems, “Because I did not stop for Death.” Her work is known for the unique use of metaphors and “flower language” to symbolize topics such as prudence, youth, and poetry, but its real distinction is its structure. In her writing style, Dickinson challenged conventions by ignoring the rules of grammar and syntax and using line braking, punctuation, and capitalization in unfamiliar ways. It created a sort of off-rhymes that formed into an enigmatic and haunting personal voice that made her one of the most important and influential poets of the 19th century and American literature at large.   Dive deeper into the inspiring story of Emily Dickinson with our fun and engaging printable worksheet! Available now on Etsy and Teachers Pay Teachers. Read more...

Born Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, one of six children of working-class parents. She discovered her love for books from an early age and performed poetry readings in front of her church community. Educated in the segregated public school system, she was very aware of racism, and being taught by mostly black women shaped her perspective as a girl of color. After high school, she studied English at Stanford University and continued postgraduate studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Later she completed her doctorate at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1976, at the age of 24, she began her long-life academic career. First, she taught English and Ethnic Studies at the University of Southern California, then African and Afro-American Studies at Yale, Women’s Studies at Oberlin College, and English at the City College of New York. In 1978, at 26, she published her first poetry collection titled “And There We Wept” under the name “bell hooks.” The pen name she chose is a tribute to her great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. She persisted in righting the name in lowercase letters to focus the attention on her work and ideas rather than her name and personality. In 1981, she published her first book, which she had worked on since she was 19, “Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism.” In the book titled after Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech, hooks explored the civil rights movement and feminist movements throughout the decades and examined how hundreds of years of racism and sexism affect Black women today. The book was recognized for its contribution to feminist thought and was named “One of the twenty most influential women’s books in the last 20 years.” Three years later, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center was published, in which hooks accused second-wave feminism of racism and argued that the privileged white women’s experiences overshadowed the opportunity for multiracial feminist solidarity. During the 1980s, hooks organized a support group for Black women named the Sisters of the Yam. The group and its name were the inspiration for her 1993 book Sisters of the Yam: Black women and self-recovery, in which she celebrated Black sisterhood. The importance of sisterhood and the call to come together from an empowering point, rather than from a victim position, became a key notion in feminist thinking. After years of exploring and highlighting various aspects of racism in feminist theories, hooks developed a more active approach to solving the problem, as can be seen in her 1995 book Killing Rage: Ending Racism, in which she suggests that rage is a source of love and strength that can lead to positive change. In 2004, at 52, hooks returned to Kentucky to serve as Distinguished Professor in Residence in Appalachian Studies at Berea College. There, she established the bell hooks Institute in 2014 and the bell hooks Center in 2021. Over the years, hooks published more than 40 books, poem collections, scholarly articles, and five children’s books. In her work, she addressed racism, sexism, patriarchy, sexuality, and geographic influences. In her innovative approach, hooks changed common perceptions of the subjects she explored and redefined feminist theories and Women’s Studies. She died of kidney failure at the age of 69. Read more...

Mary Ann Evans was born in Nuneaton, England. From a young age, she was an avid reader, and because she was not considered beautiful, which reduced her potential to find a husband, her parents decided to nurture her education, a rare offer to girls at the time. At the age of five, she was sent to a boarding school in Attleborough and returned to Nuneaton at 13 to attend Mrs. Wallington’s school and later attended Miss Franklin’s school in Coventry. At 16, after her mother died, she returned home to run her father’s household. She continued to educate herself by corresponding with her teacher and visiting the library of the local landowner in Arbury Hall. At 21, she moved with her father to Coventry. There, she became friends with the Bray family, who were liberal philanthropists that campaigned for various social radical causes. Their home was a gathering place for freethinkers, and she became acquainted with agnostic theologies and writers. Questioning her faith, she translated David Strauss’ controversial theological work into English, published in 1846 as The Life of Jesus Critically Examined. She also published essays and reviews in Bray’s newspaper, the Coventry Herald and Observer. At the age of 30, right after her father’s funeral, she traveled with the Brays to Geneva, Switzerland, where she immersed herself in reading and writing. In the following year, she returned to England and settled in London with the intent of becoming a freelance writer while attending mathematics classes at Ladies College. She boarded at the house of John Chapman, the publisher of the left-wing journal The Westminster Review, and soon she began to work as his assistant editor. She contributed to the journal articles expressing her views on society and the gap between the classes. That year, she met the philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes, and within a few years, they lived together. Though he was married, the couple considered themselves husband and wife, while his legal wife had children with another man. In 1857, at the age of 37, she published her first story in the book Scenes of Clerical Life, a collection of stories about the people of her childhood surroundings in Warwickshire. She used the male pen name George Eliot for the first time to ensure that her fiction writing would not be related to her previous work and to avoid the stereotype of contemporary women novelists who were not taken seriously. Two years later, she published her first novel, Adam Bede. Its instant success prompted the interest in the author’s identity, and eventually, Eliot revealed that she was the woman behind the name. Eliot’s unusual relationship did not harm her popularity, and she continued to write and publish six more novels and dozens of poems in the next two decades. In her writing, she presented political and social situations, particularly in Middlemarch, a novel about small-town life on the eve of the Reform Bill of 1832. Many of her characters were outsiders and misfits of rural society portrayed with a method she developed of psychological analysis. In 1876, at the age of 57, Eliot published her last novel, Daniel Deronda. Afterward, she and Lewes moved to Witley, Surrey, where Lewes died two years later. Following his death, she spent her time and efforts editing his final work, Life, and Mind and founded the George Henry Lewes Studentship in Physiology at Cambridge. In 1880, she married John Walter Cross, a Scottish commission agent 20 years her junior. They settled in Chelsea, and six months later, she died from a throat infection coupled with the kidney disease she had for several years. She was 61 years old. Read more...

María de Zayas y Sotomayor was born in Madrid, Spain to an aristocrat family. Her father was an infantry captain, and growing up, the family frequently moved. Around 1632, in her early 40s, Zayas began to publish her poetry – love and satirical pieces and praise poems for various contemporary writers who were part of the literary circles in Madrid. She also wrote a play titled La traicion en la Amistad (Friendship Betrayed). In 1637, at the age of 47, she published her first novellas collection, Novelas Amorosas y ejemplares (Amorous and Exemplary Novels), and ten years later, she published her second collection, Desengaños Amorosos (The Disenchantments of Love). In the first volume, the characters are gathered together over five nights to help the leading character, Lisis, recover from an illness. In the second volume, the characters reunite in a three-night celebration for an upcoming wedding of Lisis. In both collections, most of the stories are told by women and deal with subjects of seductive men and abusive husbands. Some of the characters suffer torture, deprivation, and death from violent spouses and male relatives, and many of the female protagonists end up in a convent, depicted as a sanctuary from male abuse and as a haven of the women’s community. By writing in a realistic style, Zayas illuminated the struggles faced by women in the paternalistic society of 17th century Spain and guided her readers on how to treat women properly. During her time, Zayas’ work was welcomed with open arms, and she enjoyed the respect of her contemporaries. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, the novellas were translated into French, German, Dutch, Italian, and English. The 19th-century puritanism approach changed the perspective of her writings, observing them as vulgar and obscene. As a result, Zayas and her work were forgotten. It was only in the 1970s that feminist scholars rediscovered her, and many scholars worldwide became interested in her and her work, translating, writing papers, and essay collections about them. The interest in her increased the attention of other women writers of the Golden Age. Today she is considered one of the pioneers of modern literary feminism. Read more...

Lucy Maud Montgomery was born in Clifton in Prince Edward Island, Canada. At 21 months old, following her mother’s death, she went to live with her maternal grandparents in Cavendish. Living with an elderly couple, she spent much of her childhood alone, creating imaginary friends, reading, and writing. By the age of nine, she kept a journal and wrote poetry, and at 16, she published her first poem, On Cape LeForce, in the Charlottetown paper The Daily Patriot. In 1893, at 18, she attended Prince of Wales College and obtained her teaching license in only one year instead of two. Afterward, she began to work as a teacher in various schools in Prince Edward Island, taking time off to study literature at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She kept writing, and in 1897, at 23 years old, Montgomery began to publish short stories in newspapers and magazines, reaching more than 100 publications in a decade. In 1898, she returned to Cavendish to take care of her widowed grandmother, living there for the next 13 years. In June 1908, she published her first novel and her most known work, Anne of Green Gables, inspired by her childhood experiences in the rural and traditional environment of Prince Edward Island. The book was a best-seller, going through six printings within six months, and later translated to over 36 languages and adapted into dozens of movies, TV series, films, radio, stage, and web production. The book’s success established Montgomery’s career as a novelist. In 1911, at the age of 37, she married Ewen Macdonald, a Presbyterian minister, and the couple moved to Ontario. In addition to her duties as the minister’s wife, she continued to write and publish her work. WW1 had a significant impact on her husband. His religious melancholia caused him to decline mentally, and he ended up hospitalized. While taking care of her husband, she wrote another successful book series, Emily of New Moon, also set on Prince Edward Island. In 1926, Montgomery and her husband moved to a new congregation in Norval, Ontario, where they lived until her husband resigned from the ministry. The stress she experienced influenced her writing, and in 1933, she published the book Pat of the Silver Bush, which was darker an aimed toward adult readers rather than young people. In 1935, they moved to Toronto, where Montgomery had a breakdown that led her to return to her first heroine, Anne, and she published two more books in the series. The outbreak of WW2 had affected her mental and physical health, and by 1941, she did not leave her house. The following year, she died at the age of 67. She is buried in the Cavendish Cemetery on Prince Edward Island. Montgomery published 20 novels, 500 poems, 530 short stories, and 30 essays during her lifetime. Read more...

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to free parents. At 3, both of her parents had died, and she went to live with her maternal aunt and uncle, who were civil rights activists and abolitionists. She attended the Watkins Academy for Negro Youth, which her uncle had founded, and at 13, began to work as a nursemaid for a Quaker family who owned a bookshop. In her free time, she continued her education by herself, reading the books in the shop and sharpening her writing skills. At 14, she began publishing her poems in antislavery journals, such as Frederick Douglass’ The Liberator. In 1845, at 20, she published her first verse collection, titled Forest Leaves. At 26, she moved to Wilberforce, Ohio, where she taught domestic science at Union Seminary, a school for free African-Americans, where she was the first female teacher. After two years, she moved to teach at another school in York, Pennsylvania, joined the American Anti-Slavery Society and continued to publish her poems. In 1854, at 29, she delivered her first antislavery speech called The Elevation and Education of Our People, which received praise. Afterward, she embarked on a two-year lecturing tour in Maine, in which she often recited from her second book, Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects. She became a popular orator, and over the next eight years, she gave lectures across the US and Canada. She published essays, novels, and short stories, in which she wrote about the observations of her traveling, expressing her thoughts about racism, abolition, feminism, temperance, and classism. In 1860, at the age of 35, she married Fenton Harper. When he died four years later, she resumed her lectures and began to connect with women’s rights advocates, such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In 1866, at the National Woman’s Rights Convention, she gave a speech titled We Are All Bound Up Together, calling for the inclusion of Black women in the suffrage movement, emphasizing that Black women were facing racism in addition to sexism. The next day, the attendees formed the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) to advocate for African-Americans’ and women’s right to vote. In the short time the AERA operated, Harper served on its Finance Committee. In 1870, following the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted Black men the right to vote, Harper began to work with the Freedmen’s Bureau in Mobile, Alabama, to encourage as many people to use their right to vote. She detailed her encounters with the newly freed men and their struggles in her poem collection, Sketches of Southern Life. In the next two decades, Harper was involved in numerous reform organizations. She headed the Colored Section of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania, served as the director of the American Association of Education of Colored Youth, and co-founded the National Association of Colored Women alongside Harriet Tubman and Margaret Murray Washington, later serving as its vice president. During this time, she continued to publish her work, including 12 books and countless essays and articles. She died of heart failure at the age of 85. Read more...

Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana was born in San Miguel Nepantla, in what was known at the time as “New Spain,” nowadays, Mexico. She was the illegitimate child of a Spanish father and a Creole mother and grew up in her maternal grandfather’s estate in Amecameca. From an early age, Juana loved to read. She hid in the chapel, reading her grandfather’s books, some forbidden to girls. At the age of three, she already knew to read and write in Latin. At eight, she composed her first poem, and as a teenager, she mastered Greek logic. In 1664, 16 years old, Juana was sent to Mexico City to serve as a lady-in-waiting at the colonial Viceroy’s court (the Spanish monarch representative). There, she came under the tutelage of the Vicereine’s wife and continued her self-education, impressing the courtiers with her wisdom. At 17, the Viceroy invited 40 scholars to test her knowledge about philosophy, science, and literature. Afterward, her name became known throughout New Spain. She wanted to study at the university but got denied because of her gender. In 1677, at the age of 19, she moved to a convent. Convent life allowed Sor Juana to study and write as much she wanted. She also taught music and became the convent’s accountant and archivist. The Viceroy continued to support her and published her writings in Spain. Sor Juana’s writings were diverse and included sonnets and ballads, scholar and philosophical essays, and even plays and music, relying on both biblical and secular sources. Her plays were about brave and clever women, and she emphasized their sense and knowledge instead of the passionate portray that was common at the time. She accused men of their illogical behavior in criticizing women. Her poems often had autobiographical elements, reflecting her experiences as a woman in a quest for knowledge. By her 30s, Sor Juana became the unofficial poet of the court, writing plays and poetry that were commissioned for religious services and state festivals. With her rising fame came the church’s disapproval, and when the current Viceroy returned to Spain, her privileges were renowned. In 1690, the bishop of Puebla published under a pseudonym of a nun a critique Sor Juana wrote of a 40-year-old sermon by a Portuguese Jesuit preacher, alongside a letter he wrote discussing his notions that as a woman, Sor Juana should devote herself to prayer and give up writing and secular studies. Sor Juana published a response letter, which defended women’s right to education, listing biblical and contemporary educated women and using quotes of St. Paul and St. Jerome that supported her argument. She also claimed that women need to serve in positions of authority and to educate other women to avoid dangerous situations and intimate settings with male teachers. Her opinions got rejected by the church, who constantly criticized and pressured her to stop writing. By 1693, at the age of 45, Sor Juana seemingly ceased writing. She sold her books, an extensive library of more than 4,000 publications. Two years later, she passed away after tending her fellow sisters who contracted the plague. She was 47 years old. In the 20th century, with the rising of modern feminism, Sor Juana once again became known for her writings and ideas. Today, she is considered a national icon of Mexican identity and credited as the last writer of the Hispanic Baroque and the first feminist of the New World. Read more...

Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, the youngest of eight children of sharecroppers. At 8, she was injured in her eye after her brother played with a BB gun, causing her permanent blindness in one eye. The mark on her eye made her an easy target to her classmates, so she turned to poetry for comfort. Growing up in the segregated south, she attended an only black kids’ high school, from which she graduated valedictorian. Her high scores granted her a full scholarship to Spelman College, where she studied for two years before transferring to Sarah Lawrence College in NYC. In this period, Walker had an abortion which caused her suicidal thoughts. She wrote all about it in her poems. In 1965, at the age of 21, Walker moved to Jackson, Mississippi, and became active in the civil rights movement. She worked for the Legal Defense Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and as a consultant in black history to the Friends of the Children of Mississippi Head Start program while serving as writer-in-residence in various academic institutes publishing essays and short stories. At 23, she married Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights attorney. At the time, interracial marriage was illegal in the south, and the couple had to travel to NYC to get married. On their return, they became the first legally married interracial couple in Mississippi since 1822, when the miscegenation laws passed. During their nine years of marriage, they suffered recurring harassment from the Ku Klux Klan. In 1970, at 26, Walker published her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, following the life of an abusive sharecropper husband and father. Three years later, she was appointed editor of Ms. Magazine, published her second poetry collection and her first collection of short stories. In 1976, Walker returned to NYC and published her second novel Meridian, about several civil rights activists in the south during the 1960s. In the late 1970s, she moved to California, where she wrote her best-known work, The Color Purple. Published in 1982, the novel explores the struggles of a black woman in the racist and patriarchal society of 1900s Georgia. The book was a best-seller, and in the following year, 39 years old Walker became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Later the novel was adapted into a film featuring Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg and a Broadway musical produced by Quincy Jones and Oprah Winfrey. In 1984, she co-founded the feminist publishing company Wild Tree Press. She deepened the world of some of her characters from The Color Purple in two of her novels, The Temple of My Familiar and Possessing the Secret of Joy, and created new characters that allowed her to delve into other social issues, such as female sexuality in By the Light of My Father’s Smile from 1998, and identity questions in Now Are the Time to Open Your Heart from 2005. Throughout the decades, Walker published seven novels, ten poetry collections, four short stories collections, four children’s books, and a dozen collections of essays and articles. In all of her work, Walker deals with the struggles of black people, especially women, and their experiences in sexist, racist, and violent surroundings. Often using Black vernacular, which highlights the hundreds of years of slavery and oppression, she had dealt with complex topics such as rape, isolation, bisexuality, and troubled relationships within the black community. Walker is a long-time social and political activist, promoting and fighting for various causes, from black and women’s rights to environmental issues, Palestinians’ fight for independence, and the elimination of female genital mutilation. Read more...

Emily Pauline Johnson was born on the Six Nations Reserve, Ontario, Canada. Her father was a Mohawk chief, and her mother, an English immigrant, educated their children to respect both cultures and heritage. Johnson was a sickly child and could not attend the reserve school, so she was educated at home by her mother and non-Indigenous governesses. At 14, she went to study at Brantford Central Collegiate. There, she began to write poems and perform, continuing this at home after graduation. In 1883, at the age of 22, Johnson published her first full-length poem in a magazine. In the following year, her father died, and she moved with her mother and sister to Brantford. She continued to publish her poems and began to perform on stage to support her family. In 1886, 25 years old Johnson got the commission to write a poem for the unveiling ceremony of the statue of Joseph Brant, who was a Mohawk leader who allied with the British during the American Revolutionary War. In her poem, Ode to Brant, she called for brotherhood between Native and white Canadians. An article about her poem in the Toronto Globe increased the interest in her and her heritage, and afterward, she began to publish her poems regularly in various magazines. Her poetry portrayed the Indigenous culture and “traditional” topics, such as love, landscapes, and Canadian life. In 1892, at the age of 31, Johnson was invited to read her poetry at a Canadian authors’ event of The Young Men’s Liberal Association. She was the only woman who performed at the event and the only one to be asked for an encore. Recognizing her talent, the event organizer offered her a solo show to recite her poetry and stories. Her show emphasized both aspects of her culture and heritage. She began her performance as Tekahionwake, her great-grandfather’s Mohawk name, wearing traditional Mohawk dress and reciting “Indian” lyrics; in the second act, she changed into Victorian women clothing and read the “English” verses. Her show was tremendously popular, and she embarked on multiple speaking tours in Canada, the US, and England. During this time, Johnson continued writing poems and releasing two poetry collections, The White Wampum in 1895 and Canadian Born in 1903. In 1909, at 48, Johnson retired from the stage and moved to Vancouver, British Columbia. She continued to write and publish poems and a series of tales based on folklore stories of the Squamish Chief Joe Capilano. In 1912, she published her last poetry collection Flint and Feather. Johnson died of breast cancer in the following year, at 52 years old. Throughout her life, she wrote hundreds of poems and stories, in which she broke the cultural barriers of her time, exploring identity as a mixed ethnic woman during the 19th century. Read more...

Margaret Eleanor Atwood was born in Ottawa, Canada, and grew up in Ontario and Quebec. From an early age, she was an avid reader, writing plays and stories at the age of 6, and by 16 began to write professionally. After graduating high school, she went to Victoria College at the University of Toronto, where she published articles and poems in the college’s literary journal. In 1961, she received her Bachelor’s degree in English, with minors in philosophy and French. In that same year, at 22, Atwood published her first poetry collection, Double Persephone, for which she received the E.J. Pratt Medal. She continued to graduate studies at Radcliffe College of Harvard University and pursued doctoral studies but did not submit her dissertation. She continued to write while studying, publishing two more poetry collections, The Circle Game (1966) and The Animals in That Country (1968). In 1968, at the age of 29, Atwood married the writer Jim Polk, but they divorced a few years later. Soon after, she met her life-long partner, the novelist Graeme Gibson, with whom she has one daughter. In 1969, Atwood published her first novel, The Edible Woman, a metaphoric satire about the social status of women and consumerism in North America. Those themes of feminism and materialism return in many of her works. Over the next decade, she published four more novels, eight poetry collections, and the award-winning short stories collection, titled Dancing Girls. While writing and publishing her work, Atwood taught English in various colleges and universities. Including the University of British Columbia, York University in Toronto, and New York University. She also served as MFA Honorary Chair at the University of Alabama and as Writer-in-Residence in Macquarie University, Australia, and Trinity University, Texas. During the 1980s, she published two of her most recognized novels, Bodily Harm and The Handmaid’s Tale, which also performed as an Opera, and later was adapted into a movie and an acclaimed TV show. Her success and productivity persisted well into the next two decades, publishing the novel Alias Grace in 1996, the Odyssey-inspired novella The Penelopiad in 2005, the praised trilogy MaddAddam in 2013, and The Handmaid’s Tale sequel, The Testaments in 2019. By 2021, Atwood published 18 novels, 10 short fiction collections, 22 poetry collections, 7 children’s books, 11 non-fiction, as well as graphic novels, television scripts, and Opera libretti. Her work was published in more than 45 countries, and some of it was adapted for stage and screen. In her writings, Atwood explores global and personal politics, women’s role in society, power dynamics, and environmental degradation. Most of her heroines are modern-urban women, often artists or writers, who fight to survive in a men-dominated society. Read more...