We invite you to discover our books by and about women whose ideas and lives continue to cultivate a better world for all.
$34.95 Hardcover
96 pages • 7.5 x 8.5 inches
Color illustrated throughout
Date: 04/09/2024
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-61332-232-1
A Tribute to the Power of Spiritual Practice, Creative Expression, and True Self-Acceptance
I Opened the Gate Laughing is the story of one woman’s journey to creative freedom through gardening and the teachings of Zen. Born in Japan, Mayumi Oda comes back to the practice of Buddhism at beautiful Green Gulch Farm retreat center in Northern California, where she finds a new tranquility and creative spirit through her pen, her brush, and her trowel to overcome the constraints of a traditional upbringing and the sadness of the end of a marriage. This enchanting book is a meditation on the search for inner peace and reawakening. awash with luscious prints and watercolors, beautifully designed, and filled with vivid stories and verse. I Opened the Gate Laughing is a resource for anyone seeking a slower pace, a sacred space, and a garden path.
$22.95 Paperback
256 pages • 5.83 x 8.27 inches
17 black and white images
Date: 10/17/2023
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-219-2
Fearless personal essays from a treasured feminist poet and activist.
Luck is a collection of essays covering such topics as memory, language, landscape, poetry, anger, sex, food, pandemics, war, violence, feminism, lies, imagination, death, power, identity, and of course luck. Some are full-blown explorations, others brief riffs. Some are prose poetry, others straightforward prose. The author combines scholarly research with personal experience, producing texts both intimate and illuminating. Always attentive to the world around her and the one within, Randall has brought us her most relevant and powerful essays to date.
Skyscraper Settlement: The Many Lives of Christodora House
By Joyce Milambiling
$22.95 Paperback
288 pages • 5.5 x 8.5 inches
12 black and white images
Date: 09/19/2023
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-215-4
The roles that Christodora House has played from 19th-century settlement house to its newest forms.
Settlement house workers helped transform the lives of thousands of people despite lack of funding, the influenza epidemic of 1918, economic depressions, and two World Wars. Many of these houses still exist in the original neighborhoods where they confront the problems of today and advocate for their communities.
Christodora House, founded in 1897 as “The Young Women’s Settlement,” played an important role in the life of immigrants and other residents on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. For over 50 years, residents and volunteers at Christodora House provided classes, clubs, recreational activities, and medical and dental clinics for thousands of New Yorkers, and then continued to operate programs out of public housing and other locations for more than two decades.
The building at 143 Avenue B, now housing condominiums, has had a tumultuous history since 1948 but still stands, towering over its tenement neighborhood in the East Village. Christodora Inc. is now a nonprofit foundation with offices in Midtown Manhattan, whose staff works with underserved New Yorkers, including youth in the public school system, carrying on a long, distinguished history of service to the city and country.
Stuff: Instead of a Memoir
By Lucy R. Lippard
$44.95 Hardcover
8 x 8 inches
300 color images
Date: 09/12/2023
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-61332-224-6
Colorfully written and illustrated memoir of the activist art writer Lucy Lippard.
Stuff: Instead of a Memoir is a short, abundantly illustrated autobiography of the American art writer, activist, and sometime curator Lucy R. Lippard. Describing tchotchkes, photographs, and art in her unpretentious New Mexico home, the author informally narrates key events and relationships in her 86-year-long, highly creative life, starting with her family roots and her childhood in New York, Louisiana, Virginia, and Maine. Through anecdotal and often humorous memories, we follow the author through her youth, adulthood, relationships, and her thirty-five years in New York City, where she organized dozens of exhibitions, authored hundreds of articles, and co-founded Heresies: A Feminist Journal of Art and Politics, the artist’s-book center Printed Matter, and activist artists group PAD/D. Lippard touches on the roles she played in Conceptual Art and the Feminist Art movement in the 1960s through the 1980s. Her accounts of more recent years focus on the art, landscape, culture, and communities of the American Southwest, where she moved in the early 1990s. This “anti-memoir” also mentions Lippard’s twenty-five books, but few of her many honors.
In the Camp of Angels of Freedom: What Does It Mean to Be Educated?
By Arlene Goldbard
$34.95 Paperback
224 pages • 7 x 10 inches
15 color images
Date: 01/24/2023
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-198-0
What does it mean to be educated? Through her evocative paintings and narrative, author Arlene Goldbard has portrayed eleven people whose work most influenced her—what she calls a camp of angels. She sees each as a brave messenger of love and freedom for a society that badly needs “uncolonized minds.” Goldbard describes how the learning from each changed the course of her life in essays that offer generative moments of a life in art and social change. She also reveals ways a dominant society tried to put a first-generation American from a socially marginal family in her place—and failed. Readers will learn about the author’s own self education, issues of formal higher education and its discontents, and the damage done by a society that prizes profits over people. Goldbard asks readers to consider the impact of credentialism on U.S. society and what we can do to set it right.
The “angels” whose work shaped Goldbard’s life are Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, James Baldwin, Nina Simone, Paul Goodman, Doris Lessing, Alice Neel, Paulo Freire, Isaiah Berlin, John Trudell, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Jane Jacobs. Despite their many differences, each had the gift of questioning assumptions, looking beneath surfaces, and imagining without bounds. The author invites readers to scrutinize their own educations and to honor their own angels.
$19.95 Paperback
176 pages • 5.5 x 8.5 inches
5 black and white images
Date: 09/13/2022
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-174-4
Also available as hardcover or eBook
The Book of Judith honors Judith Tannenbaum but also reflects, through both form and content, on the complexities of seeing both the parts and the whole. The book presents different aspects of Judith—poet, teaching artist, friend, mentor, colleague—through a collection of original poetry, prose, essay, illustration, and fiction from 33 contributors. In so doing, it echoes her own determination to perceive contradiction without judgment. For the next generation of teaching artists in Corrections and elsewhere, the book serves as an inspiration on the qualities needed to survive and thrive in a multi-faceted, ever-changing environment.
$22.95 Paperback
240 pages • 6 x 9 inches
10 black and white images
Date: 09/06/2022
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-170-6
Also available as hardcover or eBook
Inherited Silence tells the story of beloved land in California’s Napa Valley. Author Louise Dunlap’s ancestors were among the first Europeans to claim ownership of traditional lands of the Wappo people during a period of genocide. They lived the dream of Manifest Destiny; their consciousness changing only gradually over the generations. Dunlap looks back into California’s and America’s history for the key to their silences and a way to heal the wounds of the land, its original people, and the harmful mind of the colonizer. Inherited Silence offers a way for every reader to evaluate their own current life actions and the lasting impact they can have on society and our planet.
$30.00 Paperback
352 pages • 6 x 9 inches
59 black and white images
Date: 06/28/2022
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-166-9
Also available as hardcover or eBook
Divining Chaos provides a personal memoir of eco-artist Aviva Ramani. The story gives insight into her Trigger-Point theory thesis and unparalleled exclusivity to the moments in her life that shaped her as an artist and activist. Detailing the history that led Rahmani to two seminal projects: Ghost Nets, restoring a coastal town dump to flourishing wetlands, and The Blued Trees Symphony, which applied the premises to challenge natural gas pipelines with a novel legal theory about land use, Ramani shares intimate decisions that shaped her life’s work.
$30.00 Hardcover
240 pages • 5.83 x 8.27 inches
71 color images
Date: 04/12/2022
ISBN (hardcover): 978-1-61332-159-1
Also available as eBook
Artists in My Life is a collection of intimate and conversational accounts of the visual artists that have impacted the renowned poet activist Margaret Randall on her own journey as an artist. Each story offers insight into the artist’s life and work, and analyses the impact it had on Randall’s own work and its impact on the larger art community. The work strives to answer bigger questions about visual art as a whole and its lasting political influence on the world stage.
$26.95 Paperback
352 pages • 6 x 9 inches
50 black and white images
Date: 03/22/2022
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-61332-150-8
Also available as hardcover or eBook
Talking to the Girls is a written memorial to the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. The fire broke out on March 25, 1911 on the eighth floor of the Asch Building in Greenwich Village, where approximately 500 workers, mostly young immigrant women and girls, labored to produce fashionable cotton blouses, known as “waists.” Talking to the Girls brings together stories from writers, artists, activists, scholars, and family members of the Triangle workers to speak on this singular, tragic event that had a remarkable impact.
A fascinating and wonderfully written book that shows how Scranton played an enormous role in shaping Jane Jacobs’s thinking about urban life. It reframes not only who Jacobs was, but also what Scranton was in the early 20th-century.
—Mark Hirsch
A brilliant work of scholarship that convincingly shows how Jane Jacobs’s canonical work on urbanism and the life of great cities, her work on city and national economies, and her underlying social and ethical foundations developed in the historic, mid-sized city of Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Randall’s hope was to show us ‘how the objects and places that move us breathe their life into ours.’ In this, she certainly succeeds. A heartwarming celebration of the author’s compelling life.
—Kirkus Reviews
My Life in 100 Objects is a personal reflection on the events and moments that shaped the life and work of one extraordinary woman. With a masterful, poetic voice, Margaret Randall uses talismanic objects and photographs as launching points for her nonlinear narrative. Through each “object,” Randall uncovers another part of herself, starting in a museum in Amman, Jordan, and ending in the Latin American Studies Association in Boston. Interwoven throughout are her most precious relationships, her growth as an artist, and her brave, revolutionary spirit.
Richly informed, emotionally centered, beautifully written, Visitors is a book to be read by all who crave a deeper understanding of the times in which we live.
—Vivian Gornick
Discover the adventures of Ann Snitow who, as a Western feminist, helped build a new, post-communist feminist movement in Eastern Central Europe. What kinds of feminism should they hope for?
This is important reading for aspiring women artists today, and evidence that the received history of the feminist movement . . . is not always the full picture.
—Suzanne Lacy, Chair, MFA in Public Practice, Otis College of Art and Design
Sabra Moore vividly recounts an era of social upheaval, in which women artists responded to war, racial tension and reconciliation, cultural and aesthetic inequality, and struggles for reproductive freedom.
Visit Sabra Moore’s exhibition and hear her speak at Barnard College.
Nadina LaSpina’s beautifully written narrative reveals a conscientious citizen and an exuberant and vibrant woman.
—Simi Linton, author of My Body Politic
Nadina LaSpina’s empowering tale includes countless battles with ableism and sexism, all of which she faces with the help of her activist community, her friends, and her fierce fighting spirit.
Upcoming Such a Pretty Girl events
In the Company of Rebels is one of the most profoundly moving books I’ve read in years.
—Margaret Randall, author of Exporting Revolution and many dozen books of poetry and prose
Chellis Glendinning creates a collective portrait of the rebels, artists, radicals, and thinkers who through word and action not only helped mold our nation’s understanding of social issues, but helped shape her into the activist she is today.
A delicious international and interdisciplinary banquet of offerings to honor the passionate and multifaceted work of our beloved urbanist, Jane Jacobs.
—Wendy Sarkissian, author, Kitchen Table Sustainability and Creative Community Planning
Thirty pundits and practitioners across fields refresh urbanist and activist Jane Jacobs’ economic, social, and urban planning theories, which championed a community-based approach to city building, for the present day.