Montana Book Festival

After President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the editors of this anthology called for women poets of all backgrounds and job descriptions to share their workplace experiences—not just pay and promotion inequity, or workplace harassment and intimidation, but women’s ever-widening range of occupations and representation in a globalized world. Raising Lilly Ledbetter is the 3rd volume in the Human Rights Series of Lost Horse Press—a nonprofit, independent poetry publisher, involved with community outreach and social change through cultural and educational programs. 

With poems from 120 North American and international poets, and a statement from Lilly Ledbetter herself, this book was a labor of over three years. Voices in this anthology bear witness to women’s workspaces, and re-envision the world of work for women. How do women tell their workplace stories in poetry, and act as agents of change in these difficult economic times?  

Join editor Carolyne Wright, publisher Christine Holbert, contributor Melissa Kwasny along with Thomas Aslin, Tom Mitchell, and Gary Thompson to occupy the reading space for this ground-breaking anthology that celebrates women in the workplace.
 
About this book, Carolyn Forché wrote, "This remarkable anthology, gathered in tribute to Lilly Ledbetter with a toast to Carolyn Kizer, gathers the lyric art of working women, writing from the depths of at least sixty-two occupations...This is anthology as page-turner, as fist in the air, as do-it-yourself manual against despair. Here, and in gratitude to Lilly Ledbetter, is the music of a movement, and it is one of the best of our time."

And Cynthia Hogue wrote that "When we open Raising Lilly Ledbetter, we enter a world that has been, like women’s work and working women historically, silenced or trivialized (or both).  The poems gathered in Raising Lilly Ledbetter counter all that.”