Featuring Annie Finch with contributors Mahogany Browne, Desiree Cooper, Camonghne Felix, Kristen Ghodsee, Katha Pollitt, and Manisha Sharma:
The debate about the morality, legality, and politics of abortion has reached a tragic impasse in the United States. What fresh perspectives, complex insights, and wisdom can poets, dramatists, and fiction writers bring to this crucial cultural discussion? BPL Presents and Annie Finch invite you join a discussion to examine what diverse literary artists have to say on this fundamental issue of reproductive and human freedom.
Brooklyn-based poet Annie Finch will facilitate. Finch is editor of Choice Words: Writers on Abortion, the first major collection of literature about abortion by writers from the sixteenth through twenty-first centuries and across cultures, ethnicities, genders and sexualities. The book’s classic and contemporary writers—including Audre Lorde, Margaret Atwood, Lucille Clifton, Amy Tan, Ursula LeGuin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ntozake Shange, Anne Sexton, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and Langston Hughes—show us how class, patriarchy, race, ethnicity, and faith traditions impact our understanding and experience of abortion—and how we can reclaim the power to define abortion for the coming world of freedom and justice.