I’ve heard enough of military men and their odes to our beloved country and or their wives, enough of Norton Anthology’s version of American Literature. Why are we still studying the same “classic” authors and their outdated work? And why did only my most progressive (and only female) professor teach me the good stuff? I want hear the other story, the woman’s view, what is was like being a first or second generation immigrant, I wanna listen to what it is like being a woman with a mind like fucking Einstein being told that you are not worthy of a proper education.

Generally, works that are characterized under, “American Literature” begin with the early 1700s and end with the early 1900s, in a time where realistically, only a white man’s voice was respected. SO, I’m not sure if it is just researchers being super lazy and not wanting to update their work, or that people genuinely believe that this is all their is to literature that grounded our world. In addition, we are missing a solid thousand years of the most recent work, and a whole lot has happened since then. Maybe “trash your textbooks” is a little harsh, but in all reality I have thousands and thousands of pages written by different (but ultimately very similar) white men, not one story of any man or woman of any color, or woman at all for that matter.

Close the story about the woman in distress awaiting a man to save her, about the stay at home mom, or the work about a wealthy slave owner, and pick up a more diverse work by authors such as Virginia Woolf, Pablo Neruda, Chinua Achebe, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, or Martin Espada. Maybe you’ll have that one empowering professor as I did, or maybe you’ll have to find them yourself, but either way you will unfold a different version of history left untold in standard textbooks.

Ultimately, it’s important not to be underwhelmed by the lack of female authors in your literature books and classes. There are so many different layers of perspectives and stories that are pushed away in the darkest and dustiest corners in this giant world of bookshelves, so here is my ode to the women and non-white men who silently made history.