Right Now

Lovely readers, right now, as I type, Lorraine López and the other PEN/Faulkner finalists, including winner Sherman Alexie, are being feted at a dinner at the Folger Shakespeare Library in DC.  Congratulations, Lorraine, on the national success of the probing, funny, honest stories of Homicide Survivors Picnic.

Congratulations to poet Carrie Shipers, whose collection Ordinary Mourning is just out (as in yesterday) from ABZ Press.  To read three of her striking poems, go here. 

Also right now, in the USA, an estimated two and a half million women--most of whom are women of color from the global South--labor as domestic workers, making possible the labor and leisure of all those who choose to leave the care of "the most precious elements of [their] lives: their families and homes," to others.  Ai-jen Poo's essay looks at our interconnections, sketches out a feminist bill of rights for domestic workers, and calls for change:

The upside-down concentration of the world's resources and wealth in the hands of a small minority at the expense of the vast majority is in fact unsustainable for everyone. Domestic worker policy demands that we recognize and value the basic care that we all require to live and provides a model for reshaping our economy to serve our collective human needs.