I founded and curated monthly reading series to celebrate women writers in New York from 2003 to 2008. The goal was to create visibility and counter the tenacious exclusion of women from publishing, literary bylines, tenured teaching jobs, and other positions of power. So many talented and accomplished writers joined us. The wonderful comedian and writer Jen Kirwin contributed from the very beginning to help create an entirely new kind of reading series. Anne Ishii promoted the Grace series masterfully, and contributed inspired curation, comics events, and her classically brilliant and insightful “Finger in the Throat Report” column that shrewdly exposed racist publishing trends with a characteristic brutal and very funny panache.

I hope to dig into the archives one of these days and make a complete list, but some of our writers included: Jill Soloway, Amy Poehler, Molly Shannon, Marjane Satrapi, Holiday Reinhorn,  Molly Jong-Fast, Ann Powers, Curtis Sittenfeld, Paula Kamen, Darcy Steinke, Rene Steinke, Hannah Tinti, Martha Witt, Phoebe Gloeckner, Ariel Bordeaux, Gabrielle Bell, Ducky Doolittle, Myla Goldberg,  and so many more.

(Grace logo created by Kevin McElroy.)