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Showing 1–17 of 17 books

  • List: Amelia Bloomer List - Young Adult Nonfiction
  • Genre: Memoir
  • Balcony on the Moon: Coming of Age in Palestine

    Balcony on the Moon: Coming of Age in Palestine

    By Ibtisam Barakat

    Picking up where Tasting the Sky left off, Balcony on the Moon follows Ibtisam Barakat through her childhood and adolescence in Palestine from 1972-1981 and chronicles her desire to be a writer. Ibtisam finds inspiration through writing letters to pen pals and from an adult who encourages her to keep at it, but the most surprising turn of all for Ibtisam happens when her mother decides that she would like to seek out an education, too. This memoir is a touching, at times funny, and enlightening look at the not often depicted daily life in a politically tumultuous area.
  • Becoming Unbecoming

    Becoming Unbecoming

    By Una

    It's 1977 and Una is 12. Other kids are into punk or ska, but Una is learning to play "Mull of Kintyre" by Wings on the guitar, and she thinks it's a really good song. There's another song, chanted on the terraces by Leeds United fans. It might not have made it on to Top of the Pops, but the boys all sing it on the walk home from school: "One Yorkshire Ripper . . . There's only one Yorkshire Ripper . . . One Yorkshire Ri-pper . . ." A serial murderer is at large in West Yorkshire and the police—despite spending more than two million man-hours hunting the killer and interviewing the man himself no less than nine times—are struggling to solve the case. As this national news story unfolds around her, Una finds herself on the receiving end of a series of violent acts for which she feels she is to blame. Unbecoming explores gender violence, blame, shame, and social responsibility. Through image and text Una asks what it means to grow up in a culture where male violence goes unpunished and unquestioned. With the benefit of hindsight Una explores her experience, wonders if anything has really changed and challenges a global culture that demands that the victims of violence pay its cost.
  • Coal to Diamonds

    Coal to Diamonds

    By Beth Ditto, Michelle Tea

    Beth Ditto, feminist punk lead singer of Gossip, shares her journey from humble and troubled beginnings in Arkansas to a member of a world-renowned band.
  • Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir

    Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir

    By Cyndi Lauper, Jancee Dunn

    In this inspiring memoir, Cyndi Lauper shares her trials and successes, including her escape from a traumatic home life, her rise in the music industry, and her critical work as a gay rights activist.
  • Dare to Disappoint: Growing Up in Turkey

    Dare to Disappoint: Growing Up in Turkey

    By Özge Samancı

    Growing up on the Aegean Coast, Ozge loved the sea and imagined a life of adventure while her parents and society demanded predictability. Her dad expected Ozge, like her sister, to become an engineer. She tried to hear her own voice over his and the religious and militaristic tensions of Turkey and the conflicts between secularism and fundamentalism. Could she be a scuba diver like Jacques Cousteau? A stage actress? Would it be possible to please everyone including herself? In her unpredictable and funny graphic memoir, Ozge recounts her story using inventive collages, weaving together images of the sea, politics, science, and friendship.
  • Grace and Grit: My Fight for Equal Pay and Fairness at Goodyear and Beyond

    Grace and Grit: My Fight for Equal Pay and Fairness at Goodyear and Beyond

    By Lilly Ledbetter, Lanier Scott Isom

    Lilly Ledbetter shares her inspiring journey from underpaid, mistreated factory employee to Supreme Court plaintiff, nationally renowned speaker and namesake of the Fair Pay Restoration Act
  • A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea: One Refugee's Incredible Story of Love, Loss, and Survival

    A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea: One Refugee's Incredible Story of Love, Loss, and Survival

    By Melissa Fleming

    Emotionally riveting and eye-opening, A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea is the incredible story of a young woman, an international crisis, and the triumph of the human spirit. Melissa Fleming shares the harrowing journey of Doaa Al Zamel, a young Syrian refugee in search of a better life. Doaa and her family leave war-torn Syria for Egypt where the climate is becoming politically unstable and increasingly dangerous. She meets and falls in love with Bassem, a former Free Syrian Army fighter and together they decide to leave behind the hardship and harassment they face in Egypt to flee for Europe, joining the ranks of the thousands of refugees who make the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean on overcrowded and run-down ships to seek asylum overseas and begin a new life. After four days at sea, their boat is sunk by another boat filled with angry men shouting threats and insults. With no land in sight and surrounded by bloated, floating corpses, Doaa is adrift with a child's inflatable water ring around her waist, while two little girls cling to her neck. Doaa must stay alive for them. She must not lose strength. She must not lose hope.
  • How to Be a Heroine: Or, What I've Learned from Reading Too Much

    How to Be a Heroine: Or, What I've Learned from Reading Too Much

    By Samantha Ellis

    Ellis, a playwright and journalist, reflects on how the heroines of classic novels have shaped her life and her ideas about gender roles, ideas of womanhood, and feminism.
  • I am a Bacha Posh: My Life as a Woman Living as a Man in Afghanistan

    I am a Bacha Posh: My Life as a Woman Living as a Man in Afghanistan

    By Ukmina Manoori

    Raised as a boy, Ukmina makes the brave choice to live as a man and later becomes an advocate for the rights of women in Afghanistan.
  • In My Father's Country: An Afghan Woman Defies Her Fate

    In My Father's Country: An Afghan Woman Defies Her Fate

    By Saima Wahab

    Escaping gender oppression and political strife, Saima immigrates to the US as a teen. Saima later ventures back to Afghanistan as an interpreter and offers a fascinating perspective on Afghan customs including a provocative analysis of gender issues.
  • Keeping Hope Alive: One Woman: 90,000 Lives Changed

    Keeping Hope Alive: One Woman: 90,000 Lives Changed

    By Hawa Abdi

    Dr. Hawa Abdi, the first female gynecologist in Somalia has saved, housed, and provided free education to thousands of Somali women.
  • Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age

    Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age

    By Amani Al-Khatahtbeh

    At nine years old, Amani Al-Khatahtbeh watched from her home in New Jersey as two planes crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That same year, she heard her first racial slur. At age eleven, when the United States had begun to invade Iraq and the television was flooded with anti-Muslim commentary, Amani felt overwhelmed with feelings of intense alienation from American society. At thirteen, her family took a trip to her father's native homeland of Jordan, and Amani experienced firsthand a culture built on pure religion, not Islamic stereotypes. Inspired by her trip and after years of feeling like her voice as a Muslim woman was marginalized and neglected during a time when all the media could talk about was, ironically, Muslim women, Amani created a website called MuslimGirl. As the editor-in-chief, she put together a team of Muslim women and started a life dedicated to activism. This is the extraordinary account of Amani's journey through adolescence as a Muslim girl, from the Islamophobia she's faced on a daily basis, to the website she launched that became a cultural phenomenon, to the nation's political climate in the 2016 election cycle with Donald Trump as the Republican nominee. While dispelling the myth that a headscarf makes you a walking target for terrorism, she shares both her own personal accounts and anecdotes from the “sisterhood” of writers that serve as her editorial team at MuslimGirl. Amani's honest, urgent message is fresh, timely, and a deeply necessary counterpoint to the current rhetoric about the Middle East.
  • Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

    Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman

    By Lindy West

    Coming of age in a culture that demands women be as small, quiet, and compliant as possible--like a porcelain dove that will also have sex with you--writer and humorist Lindy West quickly discovered that she was anything but. From a painfully shy childhood in which she tried, unsuccessfully, to hide her big body and even bigger opinions; to her public war with stand-up comedians over rape jokes; to her struggle to convince herself, and then the world, that fat people have value; to her accidental activism and never-ending battle royale with Internet trolls, Lindy narrates her life with a blend of humor and pathos that manages to make a trip to the abortion clinic funny and wring tears out of a story about diarrhea. With inimitable good humor, vulnerability, and boundless charm, Lindy boldly shares how to survive in a world where not all stories are created equal and not all bodies are treated with equal respect, and how to weather hatred, loneliness, harassment, and loss--and walk away laughing. Shrill provocatively dissects what it means to become self-aware the hard way, to go from wanting to be silent and invisible to earning a living defending the silenced in all caps.
  • Until We Are Free: My Fight for Human Rights in Iran

    Until We Are Free: My Fight for Human Rights in Iran

    By Shirin Ebadi

    The first Muslim woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, Shirin Ebadi has inspired millions around the globe through her work as a human rights lawyer defending women and children against a brutal regime in Iran. Now Ebadi tells her story of courage and defiance in the face of a government out to destroy her, her family, and her mission: to bring justice to the people and the country she loves. For years the Islamic Republic tried to intimidate Ebadi, but after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad rose to power in 2005, the censorship and persecution intensified. The government wiretapped Ebadi's phones, bugged her law firm, sent spies to follow her, harassed her colleagues, detained her daughter, and arrested her sister on trumped-up charges. It shut down her lectures, fired up mobs to attack her home, seized her offices, and nailed a death threat to her front door. Despite finding herself living under circumstances reminiscent of a spy novel, nothing could keep Ebadi from speaking out and standing up for human dignity. But it was not until she received a phone call from her distraught husband—and he made a shocking confession that would all but destroy her family—that she realized what the intelligence apparatus was capable of to silence its critics. The Iranian government would end up taking everything from Shirin Ebadi—her marriage, friends, and colleagues, her home, her legal career, even her Nobel Prize—but the one thing it could never steal was her spirit to fight for justice and a better future. This is the amazing, at times harrowing, simply astonishing story of a woman who would never give up, no matter the risks. Just as her words and deeds have inspired a nation, Until We Are Free will inspire you to find the courage to stand up for your beliefs.
  • We Believe You: Survivors of Campus Sexual Assault Speak Out

    We Believe You: Survivors of Campus Sexual Assault Speak Out

    By Annie E. Clark, Andrea L. Pino

    Across the U.S. student activists are exposing a pervasive cover-up of sexual violence on college campuses. Every day more survivors come forward. But other survivors choose not to. We Believe You elevates the stories the headlines about this issue have been missing--more than 30 experiences of trauma, healing and everyday activism, representing a diversity of races, economic and family backgrounds, gender identities, immigration statuses, interests, capacities and loves. More than 1 in 5 women and 5 percent of men are sexually assaulted at college, a shocking status quo that might have stayed largely hidden and unaddressed but for the two authors of We Believe You. In 2013, Annie E. Clark and Andrea L. Pino, then 23 and 20, building on the work of earlier activists, outed themselves as assault survivors and filed a federal complaint against the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) for mishandling such crimes; within a month, the U.S. government began to investigate UNC. Within a year, dozens of colleges were under federal investigation. But Clark and Pino rightly see themselves as two among many. Students from every kind of college and university--large and small, public and private, highly selective and less so?are sounding alarms and staking claims to justice by filing complaints, by pressing charges, and by simply living beyond the effects of assault and the betrayals of their schools. A sampling of their voices speak out in this book.
  • Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

    Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

    By Cheryl Strayed

    A memoir of personal and natural discoveries, Strayed shares her story of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail from California to Oregon as a solo woman.
  • You Can't Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain

    You Can't Touch My Hair: And Other Things I Still Have to Explain

    By Phoebe Robinson

    A hilarious and affecting essay collection about race, gender, and pop culture from celebrated stand-up comedian and WNYC podcaster Phoebe Robinson. Phoebe Robinson is a stand-up comic, which means that, often, her everyday experiences become points of comedic fodder. And as a black woman in America, she maintains, sometimes you need to have a sense of humor to deal with the absurdity you are handed on the daily. Robinson has experienced her fair share over the years: she's been unceremoniously relegated to the role of "the black friend," as if she is somehow the authority on all things racial; she's been questioned about her love of U2 and Billy Joel ("isn t that . . . white people music?"); she's been called "uppity" for having an opinion in the workplace; she's been followed around stores by security guards; and yes, people do ask her whether they can touch her hair all. the. time. Now, she's ready to take these topics to the page and she s going to make you laugh as she s doing it. Using her trademark wit alongside pop-culture references galore, Robinson explores everything from why Lisa Bonet is "Queen. Bae. Jesus," to breaking down the terrible nature of casting calls, to giving her less-than-traditional advice to the future female president, and demanding that the NFL clean up its act, all told in the same conversational voice that launched her podcast, "2 Dope Queens," to the top spot on iTunes. As personal as it is political, "You Can't Touch My Hair" examines our cultural climate and skewers our biases with humor and heart, announcing Robinson as a writer on the rise."