Writer Archives - Page 132 of 138

Phillis Wheatley

Despite spending much of her life enslaved, Phillis Wheatley was the first African American and second woman (after Anne Bradstreet) to publish a book of poems.

As a poet, author, and lecturer, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was a household name in the nineteenth century. Not only was she the first African American woman to publish a short story, but she was also an influential abolitionist, suffragist, and reformer that co-founded the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs.

Susette La Flesche Tibbles

Susette La Flesche Tibbles, an Omaha woman, spent her entire life tirelessly campaigning for Native American rights as a speaker, activist, interpreter, and writer.

Aileen Cole Stewart

The same year the United States entered the first World War, Aileen Cole Stewart passed her exams to be a nurse in Maryland and Washington, DC. Her dedication and courage helped her climb the ranks to become one of the first African American women to serve in the Army Nursing Corps. She helped establish a field hospital in Cascade, West Virginia. Stewart was also certified by the American Red Cross and served with 17 other African American nurses during the influenza epidemic of 1918.

Colette

Writer, performer and journalist Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette is best known for her 1944 novella Gigi.

Dr Teodora Krajewska

Dr Teodora Krajewska was a physician, writer and teacher who was one of the first women to practice medicine in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Austria-Hungary.

Božena Němcová

Božena Němcová was a Czech writer during the final phase of the Czech National Revival movement and has been called the founder of modern Czech prose. She is also considered the country’s first feminist writer. Her grandmother Magdalena Novotná played an important part in her life, and Němcová would later write her most famous novel, 1855’s Babička (The Grandmother), featuring a title character inspired by her grandmother. She also published another novel that year, Pohorská vesnice (The village under mountains) and her popular short story Divá Bára the following year, as well as several collections of fairy tales and legends. Her first poem, To the Czech Women, was published April 5, 1843. Her image is featured on the 500 CZK denomination of the banknotes of the Czech koruna.

Elvy Kalep

Alviine-Johanna “Elvy” Kalep was an Estonian aviator and the country’s first female pilot, as well as an artist, toy designer and children’s author.
Kalep grew up in Estonia and Russia, and later moved to China due to the Russian Civil War, before settling in Paris to study art. In 1931, she qualified as a pilot in Germany, becoming the first Estonian female pilot. Befriending American aviator Amelia Earhart, she joined the Ninety-Nines, an international organisation for women pilots, and took up the cause of encouraging other women to take up aviation. She wrote and illustrated a children’s book about flying, Air Babies, first published in 1936. The book’s 1938 reprint included a foreword from Earhart, who embarked on her last flight three days after writing the piece in 1937.
After moving to the United States, Kalep founded a toy manufacturing business in New York in 1939, where she produced a doll she had designed – when thrown into the air, Patsie Parachute would fall down slowly as a parachutist would. Although she had to close the business in 1946 due to her poor health, she made a living through the 1950s by selling patents to toy designs to larger companies. This included the successful Scribbles Dolls, which had blank faces that could be individually decorated by children, inspired by the 50,000 doll heads she had left over from the closure of the Patsie Parachute factory. In the 1960s and 1970s, she created three-dimensional paintings made out of small pieces of coloured leather, which she sold to support herself and exhibited across the United States.

Waris Dirie

Model, author, actor and activist Waris Dirie worked for the United Nations from 1997 to 2003 as a Special Ambassador for the Elimination of Female Genital Mutilation. She had written several books on the subject, and in 2002 launched her own non-profit, the Desert Flower Foundation, which raises money to increase awareness about FGM and to help those affected.

Vida Ognjenović

Vida Ognjenović is a Serbian theater director, writer, professor and diplomat.