Author Archives: legacyeditor

Reclaiming Black Biography

Lois Brown, Arizona State University Acts of reclamation are often, at their core, heroic acts of intervention and inclusion.  They are motivated by the realities of implicit and explicit gatekeeping and the politics of inclusion that relegate some to the … Continue reading

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Missed Opportunity

Mary Chapman, University of British Columbia The Reclaim Her Name project was a missed opportunity for public scholarship. Imagine what a group of Legacy readers could have come up with, had the Board of the Women’s Prize for Fiction (and … Continue reading

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On Claiming and Naming: Whose Feminism? What Ends?

Brigitte Fielder, University of Wisconsin-Madison As I consider the efficacy of the Reclaim Her Name project, I am interested in trying to understand the rhetoric of “reclaiming.” What does it mean to claim or reclaim an author’s name? Whose names … Continue reading

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What Is a Female Author?

Grace Lavery, University of California Berkeley The project aimed to mark the 25th year of the Women’s Prize for Fiction, highlight the challenges faced by female writers, past and present, and ignite a conversation as to the many reasons why … Continue reading

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Literary Recovery, #ReclaimHerName, Alice Dunbar-Nelson

Sandra Zagarell, Oberlin College Consider some of the propositions that inform the Reclaim Her Name project. One: “the author” is a singular, unified person with a “true” name. Two: that true name is a woman’s name, which she had to … Continue reading

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Which “Women” Are Prized? On Racialized Gender

Christine “Xine” Yao, University College London #ReclaimHerName invites us to affectively participate in the triumph of rescuing benighted women authors from the grasp of an agèd patriarchal literary tradition that has forced them to toil under the false mask of … Continue reading

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My Undead Name

Jules Gill-Peterson, University of Pittsburgh I have the unusual experience, for a living author, of having been both male and female — in print, that is. Not because such crossings of sex are what actually define being transgender, but because … Continue reading

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“And Yet . . .”

María Carla Sánchez, UNC Greensboro I beg a little indulgence, and an indirect path to explaining my titular ellipsis: I have been writing about three Mexican women who published poems in the newspaper El republicano during the early months of … Continue reading

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Who is This For?

Hannah Lauren Murray, University of Liverpool From its launch in August until today, a question I have repeatedly returned to is “Who is the Reclaim Her Name series for?’ “Feminists” is the obvious answer – and I thank the respondents … Continue reading

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Reclaim the Author’s Brand Name?

Ellen Gruber Garvey, New Jersey City University (Retired) At a yard sale, I once saw a bundle of towels of miscellaneous sizes and colors and degrees of usedness laid out. The seller insisted it was a set because she had … Continue reading

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