Shorewords: A Collection of American Women’s Coastal Writings

Emily Dickinson, Lucille Clifton, Rachel Carson, and Gretel Ehrlich: They hail from different regions, employ widely divergent writing styles, and are not known primarily as nature writers. Yet in Shorewords, Susan A. C. Rosen has compiled an imaginative and beautifully balanced anthology of selections from these and more than forty other important writers connected by their love for the coastline. Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Low Tide," E. Annie Proulx's "Cast Away," Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Naomi," and Ursula Le Guin's "Text" are among the diverse pieces that reveal the writers' common fascination with the people and places at water's edge. Organized thematically, Shorewords reflects women's experiences of living along the coast through a wide range of material, including short fiction, poetry, and excerpts from novels and memoirs. All reveal the rich response to shorelines women writers have expressed--and continue to express--in poetry and prose.

Includes: Jennifer Ackerman * Nancy Allen * Gloria Anzald a * Kerry Neville Bakken * Dorothy Balano * Andrea Barrett * Doris Betts * Kate Braverman * Mary Louisa Burtch Brewster * Mary Parker Buckles * Rachel L. Carson * Kate Chopin * Amy Clampitt * Lucille Sayles Clifton * Wanda Coleman * Rebecca Blaine Harding Davis * Jan DeBlieu * Emily Dickinson * Joan Didion * Annie Dillard * Gretel Ehrlich * Anita Endrezze * Diane P. Freedman * Tess Gallagher * Susan Glaspell * Mary Hood * Cynthia Huntington * Sarah Orne Jewett * Mary Karr * Susan Kenney * Carolyn Kizer * Ursula K. Le Guin * Denise Levertov * Anne Morrow Lindbergh * Nancy Lord * Sandra McPherson * Edna St. Vincent Millay * Marianne Moore * Ruth Moore * Sena Jeter Naslund * Gloria Naylor * Mary Oliver * Elizabeth Stuart Phelps * E. Annie Proulx * May Sarton * Elizabeth Spencer * Harriet Beecher Stowe * May Swenson * Sara Teasdale * Celia Thaxter

Susan A. C. Rosen, Professor of English at Anne Arundel Community College, is the author of numerous articles on American literature and the environment.