A Memory, a Monologue, a Rant, and a Prayer

by Eve Ensler

  MARK MATOUSEK is the author of two acclaimed memoirs: Sex Death Enlightenment: A True Story, an international bestseller published in ten countries, and The Boy He Left Behind: A Man’s Search for His Lost Father. A contributing editor to O: The Oprah Magazine, Tricycle, and Out, and a former editor at Interview magazine, Matousek is the co-author (with Andrew Harvey) of Dialogues with a Modern Mystic; editor of Still Here by Ram Dass, a National Magazine Award nominee; and winner of a 2001 Triangle award for nonfiction. His new book, The Roar of Freedom, will be published in 2008.

  DEENA METZGER is a novelist, poet, essayist, storyteller, and healer. Her books include From Grief into Vision: A Council, Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing, Tree: Essays & Pieces, and Writing for Your Life: A Guide and Companion to the Inner Worlds. She co-edited Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals. Her novels include The Other Hand, What Dinah Thought, and Doors: A Fiction for Jazz Horn. Her most recent books of poetry are Looking for the Faces of God and A Sabbath Among the Ruins. New and Selected Poems will be published in 2008.

  SUSAN MILLER is an award-winning playwright and Guggenheim Fellow whose works include the critically acclaimed one-woman play My Left Breast, for which she won an Obie; A Map of Doubt and Rescue, which earned her the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and the Pinter Prize for Drama; and Nasty Rumors and Final Remarks, also an Obie winner. Other plays: For Dear Life; Flux; Confessions of a Female Disorder; It’s Our Town, Too; and The Grand Design. She has been produced at the Public Theater, Second Stage, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Naked Angels, and the Mark Taper Forum, among others. Miller has also written for O: The Oprah Magazine and was a consulting producer on Showtime’s hit series The L Word.

  WINTER MILLER is a playwright. Her play In Darfur has been developed by the Guthrie Theater, the Public Theater, the Geva Theater, and the Playwrights Center. Miller has traveled with Nicholas D. Kristof to the Sudan border to interview genocide survivors. Her plays include The Penetration Play, which was published by Playscripts, Inc., and excerpted in Smith & Kraus’s Best Stage Scenes 2005 and Best Monologues 2005; Conspicuous; Something’s Wrong with Amandine; and Cake and Ice Cream. Miller has also written for The New York Times. A graduate of Smith College, she holds an M.F.A. from Columbia University and is a member of the Obie-winning 13Playwrights.

  SUSAN MINOT is the author of Monkeys, Lust & Other Stories, Folly, Evening, Rapture, and a poetry collection, Poems 4 A.M. She wrote the screenplay for Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty. Minot lives with her husband and daughter on North Haven, an island in Maine, and occasionally in New York City. “They Took All of Us” was created from an interview with Sister Rachele in Uganda conducted in 1998. All the words are hers.

  An award-winning writer, feminist leader, political theorist, journalist, and editor, ROBIN MORGAN has published more than twenty books, including six of poetry, four of fiction, and the now-classic anthologies Sisterhood Is Powerful, Sisterhood Is Global, and Sisterhood Is Forever. A founder of contemporary U.S. feminism, she has also been a leader in the international women’s movement for twenty-five years. Recent books include Saturday’s Child: A Memoir; her bestselling The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism; her new novel, The Burning Time; and her nonfiction Fighting Words: A Toolkit for Combating the Religious Right (www.robinmorgan.us).

  KATHY NAJIMY was voted Ms. magazine’s 2005 Woman of the Year. She starred as Mae West in Dirty Blonde on Broadway and wrote and starred off-Broadway in The Kathy and Mo Show, which won an Obie Award and was filmed for two HBO specials, which won Ace Awards. Najimy provides the voice of Peggy Hill on King of the Hill, starred on NBC’s Veronica’s Closet, and was thrilled to play Sharon Stone’s gynecologist in If These Walls Could Talk 2. Najimy has appeared in more than twenty films, including Hocus Pocus, Rat Race, and Say Uncle, and is internationally known as Sister Mary Patrick in the hit films Sister Act and Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit. She has been published in The New York Times and in the books Choices We Made, If You Had Five Minutes with the President, and Starpower. She has been honored for her activism with AIDS, choice, gay rights, Arabic pride, and women’s rights. She is proud to be one of the founding members of V-Day. Najimy lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Dan Finnerty (of the Dan Band), and their glorious daughter, Samia.

  LYNN NOTTAGE’s plays include A Stone’s Throw/The Antigone Project (The Women’s Project), Fabulation or, the Re-Education (Playwrights Horizons, Tricycle Theatre), and Intimate Apparel (Roundabout Theatre Company, Mark Taper Forum, South Coast Rep, Center Stage, among others). Her awards include: Lucille Lortel Playwriting Award, Obie Award, New York Drama Critics Circle, Outer Critics Circle Awards, American Theatre Critics/Steinberg, Francesca Primus, AUDELCO, National Black Theatre Festival’s August Wilson Playwriting Award, 2004 PEN/Laura Pels Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a resident member of New Dramatists and a visiting lecturer at the Yale School of Drama and Princeton University.

  SHARMEEN OBAID-CHINOY is a multiple award-winning documentary filmmaker. Obaid-Chinoy was raised in Karachi, Pakistan, and educated at Smith College and Stanford University. She began her career in 2002 with New York Times Television; since then she has produced and reported on more than nine documentary films.

  SHARON OLDS is a professor of English at New York University. She is one of the country’s most lauded poets and the author of Blood, Tin, Straw; The Wellspring; The Father; The Gold Cell; The Dead and the Living; and Satan Says. Her fellowship honors include the T. S. Eliot Prize shortlist for The Father, 1994; Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award, 1993–96; and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Dead and The Living, 1984. Chancellor, the Academy of American Poets, fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Science.

  HANAN AL-SHAYKH was born in Lebanon and grew up in Beirut. Her most recent novel, Only in London, was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. She was educated in Cairo and wrote her first novel there when she was nineteen, before returning to Beirut to work as a journalist for Annahar newspaper and Al-Hasnaa magazine. Al-Shaykh writes in Arabic, and although her novels were initially banned in many Arab countries for their sexual explicitness, her work has been translated into twenty-one languages and is now published around the world. Al-Shaykh is widely regarded as one of the foremost experts on Arab womanhood. Her latest work is a story about the life of her mother, Hikayati Sharhun Yatool.

  ANNA DEAVERE SMITH is an actress and a writer. She is said to have developed a new form of theater. She interviews people and performs them in one-person shows, looking at societal and human issues from multiple points of view. She has performed up to forty-six characters in the same show. Awards include two Obies, two Tony nominations and the MacArthur Award. She played national security adviser Nancy McNally on The West Wing and acts in films. She is the founding director of the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue and teaches at New York University.

  MONICA SZLEKOVICS (Inmate97G1571). I am a woman who is both victim and offender. I am a woman to whom very few accolades are given. I am a woman who was essentially groomed to become a heroin addict at sixteen who eventually met and became involved with a violent man. I am a woman who is seeking out her own truths. I am a woman who is exploring, accepting, and reconciling with her past. I am a woman who is actively trying to stop perpetuating the cycle of violence in her life. I am more than just a number, the consequences of my disempowerment. I have a history. I have a voice, and I am not unlike you. I am Monica Szlekovics, a thirty-year-old woman who now refuses to be demeaned, exploited, and mistreated.

  ROBERT THURMAN is the Jey Tsong Khapa Professor of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies in the Department of Religion at Columbia University; president of the Tibet House U.S., a nonprofit dedicated to the preservation and promotion of Tibetan civilization; and president of the American Institute of Buddhist Studies, a nonprofit dedicated to the publication of translations of important texts from the Tibetan Tanjur. Time magazin
e chose Thurman as one of its twenty-five most influential Americans in 1997. He is the author of many books, including Inner Revolution, Worlds of Transformation, and Infinite Life, and translator of the Tibetan Book of the Dead.

  BETTY GALE TYSON was incarcerated for twenty-five years (to the day) for a crime she didn’t commit. She credits her sanity and survival to the Bible and her mother. In 1998 she was exonerated and released from Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women. The state of New York has yet to apologize for taking away twenty-five years of her life. Tyson’s mother died six months after she got out. She lives to honor her mother’s spirit, so she spends much of her time speaking about this experience.

  ALICE WALKER is one of the most prolific and important writers of our time, known for her literary fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Color Purple (now a major Broadway play), her many volumes of poetry, and her powerful nonfiction collections. Walker has also published several children’s books. There Is a Flower at the Tip of My Nose Smelling Me is her most recent work for children and adults. In the fall of 2006 she published a book of spiritual ruminations with a progressive political edge: We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: Inner Light in a Time of Darkness.

  In 1997, JODY WILLIAMS became the tenth woman in the Nobel Peace Prize’s nearly hundred-year history to be awarded the prize for her work with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. She continues to serve as campaign ambassador. In 2006, she took the lead in co-founding the Nobel Women’s Initiative with five other women Peace Laureates to defend the rights of women around the world. Williams is also a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Houston’s Graduate College of Social Work. A writer, speaker, and activist, Jody Williams is an outspoken advocate for human rights and human security as the basis for international peace and security.

  ERIN CRESSIDA WILSON is a writer and professor in the Literary Arts Program at Brown University. She won the 2003 Independent Spirit Award for her screenplay Secretary, starring James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal. She also wrote the film Fur, starring Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey, Jr., directed by Steven Shainberg. Her twenty plays have been produced regionally, off-Broadway and abroad. With Lillian Ann Slugocki, she co-authored The Erotica Project, produced at Joe’s Pub and published by Cleis Press. She is a graduate of Smith College.

  HOWARD ZINN was a shipyard worker, then an air force bombardier. He received his Ph.D. in history at Columbia University, and taught for seven years at Spelman College in Atlanta, where he became involved in the civil rights movement. He later taught at Boston University, and has been a visiting professor in Paris and Bologna. He was active in the movement against the Vietnam War. Among his many books is the bestselling A People’s History of the United States. His plays Emma (about Emma Goldman) and Marx in Soho have been produced in the U.S. and abroad.

  CONTRIBUTION COPYRIGHTS

  Memory

  “Looking for the Body Music” by Michael Klein, copyright © 2007 by Michael Klein

  “7 Variations on Margarita Weinberg” by Moisés Kaufman, copyright © 2007 by Moisés Kaufman

  “1600 Elmwood Avenue” by Monica Szlekovics, copyright © 2007 by Monica Szlekovics

  “The Closet” by Howard Zinn, copyright © 2007 by Howard Zinn

  “Darkness” by Betty Gale Tyson with Jerry Capers, copyright © 2007 by Betty Gale Tyson

  “First Kiss” by Mollie Doyle, copyright © 2007 by Mollie Doyle

  “Groceries” by Abiola Abrams, copyright © 2007 by Abiola Abrams

  “Blueberry Hill” by Christine House, copyright © 2007 by Christine House

  “My Two Selves” by Patricia Bosworth, copyright © 2007 by Patricia Bosworth

  “The Massacre” by Marie Howe, copyright © 2007 by Marie Howe

  “My Mother with Her Hands as Knives” by Dave Eggers, copyright © 2006 by Mare Vaporum, Inc.

  “Dear Ama” by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, copyright © 2007 by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy

  “Bitter Coffee” by Jody Williams, copyright © 2007 by Jody Williams

  “Untitled” by Nicholas D. Kristof, copyright © 2007 by Nicholas D. Kristof

  Monologue

  “My House Is Wallpapered with Lies” by Carol Gilligan, copyright © 2007 by Carol Gilligan

  “Maurice” by Kathy Najimy, copyright © 2007 by Kathy Najimy “(Hey, Did You Happen to See) The Most Beautiful Girl in the World” by Jyllian Gunther, copyright © 2007 by Jyllian Gunther

  “Conversations with My Son” by Susan Miller, copyright © 2007 by Susan Miller

  “The Perfect Marriage” by Edward Albee, copyright © 2007 by Edward Albee

  “None of Us are Monologists (aka Chill)” by Anna Deavere Smith, copyright © 2007 by Anna Deavere Smith

  “Darfur Monologue” by Winter Miller, copyright © 2007 by Winter Miller

  “I Can Hear My Soul Cracking” by Slavenka Drakulić, copyright © 2007 by Slavenka Drakulić

  “Celia” by Edwidge Danticat, copyright © 2007 by Edwidge Danticat

  “They Took All of Us” by Susan Minot, copyright © 2006 by Susan Minot

  Rant

  “Woman” by Tariq Ali, copyright © 2007 by Tariq Ali

  “I’m Thinking I’ve Closed My Eyes for the Last Time” by Hanan al-Shaykh, translated by Catherine Cobham, copyright © 2007 by Hanan al-Shaykh

  “I Can’t Wait” by James Lecesne, copyright © 2007 by James Lecesne

  “In Memory of Imette” by Periel Aschenbrand, copyright © 2007 by Periel Aschenbrand

  “Respect” by Kimberle Crenshaw, copyright © 2007 by Kimberle Williams Crenshaw

  “The Aristocrats” by Kate Clinton, copyright © 2007 by Kate Clinton

  “Connect: A Web of Words” by Robin Morgan, copyright © 2007 by Robin Morgan

  “Stew” by Ariel Dorfman, copyright © 2007 by Ariel Dorfman

  “The Next Fantastic Leap” by Elizabeth Lesser, copyright © 2007 by Elizabeth Lesser

  “Give It Back” by Suheir Hammad, copyright © 2007 by Suheir Hammad

  “The Destruction Artist” by Michael Cunningham, copyright © 2007 by Michael Cunningham

  “Hands in Protest” by Erin Cressida Wilson, copyright © 2007 by Erin Cressida Wilson

  Prayer

  “The Bra” by Sharon Olds, copyright © 2007 by Sharon Olds

  “Banana Beer Bath” by Lynn Nottage, copyright © 2007 by Lynn Nottage

  “True” by Carol Michèle Kaplan, copyright © 2007 by Carol Michèle Kaplan

  “Club” by Nicole Burdette, copyright © 2007 by Nicole Burdette

  “Conversation Between Heaven and Earth” by Kathy Engel, first published in Ruth’s Skirts (Ikon Books, 2007), copyright © 2007 by Kathy Engel. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Part Owner” by Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, copyright © 2007 by Michael Eric Dyson

  “Woman Work” by Maya Angelou, from And Still I Rise (New York: Random House, Inc., 1978), copyright © 1978 by Maya Angelou. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.

  “Eye to Eye” by Deena Metzger, copyright © 2007 by Deena Metzger

  “Hail to the Vagina” by Robert Thurman, copyright © 2007 by Robert Thurman

  “Rescue” by Mark Matousek, copyright © 2007 by Mark Matousek

  “To Stop the Violence Against Women” by Alice Walker, copyright © 2007 by Alice Walker

  “Fur Is Back” by Eve Ensler, copyright © 2007 by Eve Ensler

  “Afterword: Reclaiming Our Mojo” by Jane Fonda, copyright © 2007 by Jane Fonda

 

 

 
sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share