Eight defiant books by women

Amy Butcher is an award-winning essayist and author of Mothertrucker, a book that interrogates the realities of female fear, abusive relationships, and America’s quiet epidemic of intimate partner violence set against the geography of remote, northern Alaska.

She is the Director of Creative Writing and an Associate Professor of English at Ohio Wesleyan University and teaches annually at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival and the Sitka Fine Arts Camp in Sitka, Alaska. She lives in Ohio with her three rescue dogs, beautiful beasts.

At Lit Hub Butcher tagged eight favorite defiant books by women, including:

Mira Jacobs, Good Talk

How do you explain to a 6-year-old child that America is a different America for Americans of color? This is the question that frames and establishes Jacob’s intimate and tender graphic memoir, and Jacobs sets about the task of answering with candor, nuance, humor, and grace. Perhaps the most important book I have ever read or will ever read on the post-9/11 experience for Americans of color, and a broader political and social commentary on the way our nation’s propaganda and policies are designed to comfort and protect certain Americans at the expense of other Americans’ safety, daily experience, and well-being. A vitally crucial book.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue