"One Sunday afternoon in February 1977, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, and several other Black women writers met at June Jordan’s Brooklyn apartment to eat gumbo, drink champagne, and talk about their work. Calling themselves “The Sisterhood,” the group—which also came to include Audre Lorde, Paule Marshall, Margo Jefferson, and others—would get together once a month over the next two years, creating a vital space for Black women to discuss literature and liberation.

"Women’s creative labour in publishing has often been overlooked. This book draws on dynamic new work in feminist book history and publishing studies to offer the first comparative collection exploring women’s diverse, deeply embedded work in modern publishing. Highlighting the value of networks, collaboration, and archives, the companion sets out new ways of reading women’s contributions to the production and circulation of global print cultures.

"Focusing on Clara Schumann’s central contributions to the genre of the Lied (or German art song), this is the first book-length critical study of her songs. Although relatively few in number, they were published and reviewed favorably in the press during her lifetime, and they continue to be programmed regularly in recitals by professional and amateur performers alike.

"In this queer bilingual children’s book, Chabelita’s hopes come true when Jimena, the new student whose eyes sparkle like stars, sits next to her. Through shared language and experience they easily connect. The more they learn about each other, the more time they spend together, and the more they like each other. When Chabelita shares her special bow tie with Jimena on picture day, everyone will know that they like one another.

"Coloring into Existence documents the emergence of a North American queer of color children’s literary archive, focusing on the creation, distribution, and potential impact of picture books by and about queer and trans of color authors. This comparative study across Canada, the United States, and Mexico from 1990 to 2020 fuses literary criticism and close readings with historical analysis and interviews.

"Littlejohn’s work encompasses the often-overlooked experiences of people who identify as women, gender nonconforming, and nonbinary who have used birth control to prevent pregnancy. Those experiences range from the societal pressure for women to be solely responsible for birth control to unsupportive partners and the importance of access to both birth control and abortion. She contends that preventing pregnancy is something that should be understood as shared between the individuals engaging in sexual activity that could potentially lead to a pregnancy."

"Castoffs of Capital examines how female garment workers experience their work and personal lives within the stranglehold of global capital. Drawing on fieldwork in Bangladesh, anthropologist Lamia Karim focuses attention on the lives of older women aged out of factory work, heretofore largely ignored, thereby introducing a new dimension to the understanding of a female-headed workforce that today numbers around four million in Bangladesh.

"Most books present research and pedagogies. We do something different: We share lives—personal stories of how women scholars earned graduate degrees and began careers bridging Japan and North America between the 1950s and 1980 and balanced professional and personal responsibilities. We challenge the common narrative that Japanese Studies was established by men who worked for the US military after World War II or were from missionary families in Japan. This is only part of the story—the field was also created by women who took advantage of postwar opportunities for studying Japan.

"Since the late twentieth century, multicultural reforms to benefit minorities have swept through Latin America; however, in Colombia ethno-racial inequality remains rife. Becoming Heritage evaluates how heritage policies affected the Afro-Colombian community of San Basilio de Palenque after it was proclaimed by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2005. Although the designation partially delivered on its promise of multicultural inclusion, it also created ethno-racial exclusion and conflict among groups within the Palenquero community.

"California Medieval is an intriguing hybrid memoir, interspersed with poetry, song, and lyrical vignettes. It explores the world of a Franciscan convent during the heyday of the 1960s in San Francisco at the birth of the flower-power era, as seen through the eyes of a novitiate nun, newly arrived in the Bay Area from a rural community in southwestern Washington State. This book is a stylistically and structurally adventurous narrative that forms a literary intersection of music, spirituality, nature, sociology, and sexuality.