The authors in this collection examine and critique motherhood memoir, alongside the texts of their own lives, while seeking to transform mothering practice— highlighting revolutionary praxis within books, or, when none is available, creating new visions for social change. Many essays interrogate the tensions of maternal narrative—the negotiation of the historical location of writer and readers, narrative and linguistic constraints, and the slippery ground of memory—as well as the borders constructed between the “objective” scholar and the reader who engages with and identifies with texts through her intellect and her emotional being.

Justine Dymond is an assistant professor of English at Springfield College, where she teaches writing and literature. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and a PhD in English from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her publications include essays on Linda Hogan, Mourning Dove, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, and she is the Editor of a special cluster in Modern Language Studies on 9/11 literature and culture. Her fiction and poetry have been published in numerous journals, including The Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, and The Briar Cliff Review. Her short story “Cherubs” was selected for an O. Henry Prize and also appeared on the list of distinguished stories in the 2006 Best American Short Stories. She lives in western Massachusetts with her family.

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Nicole Willey is an associate professor of English at Kent State University Tuscarawas, where she teaches African American and other literatures, along with a variety of writing courses. Her research interests include mothering, memoir, nineteenth-century American literature, and slave narratives. She wrote Creating a New Ideal of Masculinity for American Men: The Achievement of Sentimental Women Writers in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. She lives in New Philadelphia, Ohio with her husband and two sons.

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