On Sunday, Starz will air the first episode of Vida, a new series about two Mexican American sisters who, after their mother’s death, return to their quickly gentrifying neighborhood on the Eastside of LA. The show is groundbreaking, you may have heard, for its writer’s room, which is helmed by Mexican-born playwright…
In public, everyone says that Thomas Sayers Ellis, 52, formerly of Case Western and Sarah Lawrence, a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers Workshop this semester, is brilliant. Even the people who find him off-putting and unprofessional tend to agree. He’s charismatic and surprising, a protest poet, a real…
The organization VIDA makes it their job to annually count the number of female bylines and books written by women in U.S. literary magazines. While last year's count was pretty depressing, they feel that this year, there's room for hope.
"The Count," a tally of the female to male writers ratio in major review journals operated by VIDA: Women in The Literary Arts, is a necessary but immensely depressing read — not just because of the major gender disparity, but the way certain outlets have responded.
When the 2012 National Magazine Award finalists were announced last year, exactly zero women were nominated in what most journalists consider the gold-star categories: reporting, features, profiles, essays, and columns. "The National Magazine Awards have sent a pretty clear message," Erin Belieu from VIDA: Women in…
VIDA, an organization that "seeks to explore critical and cultural perceptions of writing by women through meaningful conversation and the exchange of ideas among existing and emerging literary communities," has just released its annual, soul-crushing tally of how male to female reviewers and male to female-written…
A new study based on over one million texts in the Google Books archive written between 1900 and 2008 found that the "he-she" gender pronoun gap has narrowed ever since Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique in 1963.
Journalists are conflicted about Jonah Lehrer, judging by the number of frantic Gchats and emails I received from my peers yesterday after Michael C. Moynihan broke the news in Tablet that the 31-year-old wunderkind science writer, already under fire for extensive "self-plagiarizing," attributed numerous fake quotes…
The New York Times Book Review's How-To Issue lists eight pieces on its cover, two of which are written by women. And guess what they're about? Raising children and cooking.
VIDA has counted up the female writers — and female-authored books reviewed at a variety of publications — and these charts detail their dismal results (dudes are in red). So what's behind this inequality?
