International Women’s Day is a global holiday celebrated annually on March 8 as a focal point in the women’s rights movement. The holiday brings much-needed attention to issues such as gender equality, reproductive rights, and violence and abuse against women. This year’s International Women’s Day theme is Inspire Inclusion, underscoring the importance of diversity, empowerment, and respect in all aspects of society.
AU Press recognizes the unique perspectives and contributions of women from all walks of life. This year, we have prepared a list of recommended reads for International Women’s Day that reflect the diversity of lived experiences of women from around the world.
![[book cover] Amma's Daughters](https://www.aupress.ca/app/uploads/120274_Ammas-Daughters-cover.jpg)
Amma’s Daughters: A Memoir by Meenal Shrivastava
In this re-memory, Meenal Shrivastava, uncovers the history of the female foot soldiers of Gandhi’s national movement in the early twentieth century. As Meenal weaves written accounts together with archival research and family history, she gives voice and honour to the hundreds of thousands of largely forgotten or unacknowledged women who, threatened with imprisonment for treason and sedition, relentlessly and selflessly gave toward the revolution.
What We Are When We Are: Kaj smo, ko smo by Cvetka Lipuš, translated by Tom Priestly
Working within a postmodern style, this rhythmic and melodious collection of poems originally written in Slovenian by Cvetka Lipuš and translated here by Tom Priestly, blends the real with the surreal, dull urban lives with dreams. Lipuš, known for the lexical beauty of her work, dwells on topics of time and space which she handles in an almost revolving, irreverent manner. Priestly captures the maze-like characteristic of her verse and carefully reconstructs the sonoric beauty of the work in its original language.
![[book cover] Leaving Iran](https://www.aupress.ca/app/uploads/120252_Leaving-Iran-cover.jpg)
Leaving Iran: Between Migration and Exile by Farideh Goldin
In 1976, at the age of twenty-three, Farideh Goldin left Iran in search of her imagined America. Leaving Iran knits together her father’s story of dislocation and loss with her own experience as an Iranian Jew in a newly adopted home. As an intimate portrait of displacement and the construction of identity, as a story of family loyalty and cultural memory, Leaving Iran is an important addition to a growing body of Iranian–American narratives.
Xwelíqwiya: The Life of a Stó:lō Matriarch by Rena Point Bolton and Richard Daly
Xwelíqwiya is the life story of Rena Point Bolton, a Stó:lō matriarch, artist, and craftswoman. At once a memoir, an oral history, and an “insider” ethnography directed and presented by the subject herself, the result attests both to Daly’s relationship with the family and to Point Bolton’s desire to inspire others to use traditional knowledge and experience to build their own distinctive, successful, and creative lives.
![[book cover] Xwelíqwiya](https://www.aupress.ca/app/uploads/120230_Xweliqwiya-cover.jpg)
Little Wet-Paint Girl by Ouanessa Younsi, translated by Rebecca L. Thompson
Born to a French-Canadian mother and Algerian father, Ouanessa Younsi is a bold and unique voice in modern Francophone poetry. In this intensely personal recitation on identity and ethnicity, Younsi takes the reader on a surreal odyssey through a liminal world of belonging and unbelonging, absence and presence, mind and body. Her visionary work, first published in French and translated here by Rebecca Thompson, is unsettling, riveting and guaranteed to leave readers contemplating the existential mysteries of “self.”
