On June 2nd, VIDA launches its first roundtable on issues in writing by women. It’s the first of a series that will take place every fall and winter/spring. This first panel focuses on issues around how women write about other women.

VIDA brings together a dynamic group of women to discuss the complicated ways in which biography gives voice and shape to women’s lives. Panelists will include four women who have or are currently writing literary biographies. It includes New Yorker writer and Harvard scholar Jill Lepore (Jane Franklin), New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead (George Eliot/Middlemarch), the former New Republic critic Ruth Franklin (Shirley Jackson), and Penn professor and the Nation blogger Salamishah Tillet (Nina Simone). With the series, VIDA hopes to support writing by women and create a forum for discussion about issues surrounding gender and writing. In addition to the annual VIDA COUNT which looks at bylines in major national literary publications (available at vidaweb.org), VIDA hopes this series will increase the awareness of the kinds of issues women come up against during their career.

The first roundtable event is geared to exploring two basic questions: What is it that compels us to explore the work and personalities of certain women and what are the issues we face when writing about other women? We’ll look at new ways of writing about women, how to reconstruct women’s lives when few records are available, the influence of marriage on women’s lives, and the ways in which writing about women is fraught for the biographer.

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