Ain't I a Woman

Spanning the centuries from Sappho's Greece to tenth-century Chile to Zindziswa Mandela's twentieth-century South Africa, the voices of these women poets express themes of love, injustice, motherhood and loss, and the oppressions of race and sex. The sequence of the poems moves from youth to old age, and they bear witness to the triumphs as well as the pain and frustration of women in many times and in many places.

Ilona Linthewaite began gathering this collection several years ago, initially for a theatrical performance. Here, in this unique exchange between women of many races, affirming their differences and what they have in common, are more than 150 poems which assert the black abolitionist Sojourner Truth's challenge, "Ain't I a Woman!"