December 2022 Reads for the Rest of Us

Each month, we provide Ms. readers with a list of new books being published by writers from historically excluded groups.

I want to do my part in the disruption of the “norm” in the book world for far too long—white, cis, heterosexual, male—and to amplify indie publishers and amazing works by writers who are women, Black, Indigenous, Latinx, APIA/AAPI, international, queer, trans, nonbinary, disabled, fat, immigrant, Muslim, neurodivergent, sex-positive or of other historically marginalized identities. You know … the rest of us.

Ms. Muse: Melissa Studdard on the Power of Poetry to Create the World We Want

Ms. Muse is a discovery place for riotous, righteous and resonant feminist poetry that nourishes and gives voice to a rising tide of female resistance.

How do you redeem a woman’s worst nightmare lived—or at least one of them? How do you give a mute, silenced or dead woman a voice? These are a few of the questions answered by Melissa Studdard’s poems.

“after I died / I put my clothes back on. / Like women do. / When everything has been taken.”

Jennifer Baumgardner’s New Journal ‘LIBER’ Marries Women’s History and Contemporary Feminism

Jennifer Baumgardner, founder and editor of LIBER: A Feminist Review, believes that a literary journal can be a place where women’s history intersects with today’s most pressing feminist debates. Baumgardner and Charis Caputo, LIBER’s senior editor, aim to include “a lot of diferent perspecives and be a big feminist tent for as many people as possible.”

‘We Stand With You, Megan’: Feminist Leaders and Women in Music Rally Around Megan Thee Stallion

The Southern Black Girls & Women’s Consortium has published an open letter in support of rapper Megan Thee Stallion, denouncing violence against women.

“There is no amount of power or prestige that can prevent a woman from becoming a victim of violence and there is no level of achievement that exempts women from our society’s complacency with that violence.”

The Pioneering Black Sci-Fi Writer Behind the Original Wakanda

MIT rarely allows Hollywood films to be shot on their campus. So it was a surprise when an email went out in 2021, alerting students that a film titled Summer Break would be filming at the school. Turns out, this was the working title of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

But something else was special about Wakanda Forever’s filming location. The MIT scenes were shot a stone’s throw from where, a century before, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins worked at the Institute. Hopkins is credited with inventing the setting that eventually became Wakanda in her science fiction, but her name isn’t widely known.

“She was a powerhouse, an innovator and an intellectual dynamo.”