Author: A.C.S. Bird

List-making is practically a hobby with me, and books are a passion, with children’s literature a high-ranking subcategory. Creating lists of the latter is thus a delight accompanied by the danger of disappearing into long, winding passageways papered over by picture books. This is especially true of a topic as fascinating and fruitful as women’s…

You can read Part One of this series here: https://storywarren.com/twenty-one-books-for-african-american-history-month/ Stories of those who have suffered injustice and resolved to reverse it inspire awe and admiration. Likewise worthy of respect are those who create profound art from sorrow and loss. In his treatise Art and Faith, painter Makoto Fujimura references artists who draw upon their…

Researching the collection that follows has renewed my awareness of the inescapable, tragic history of slavery in America. Conceiving of our country as it might have been apart from the scourge of slavery is enticing; possibly even redemptive, if the exercise edges us toward that vision. But deepening our knowledge of the actual past holds…

Several years ago I landed on fairy tales as my preferred winter reading genre. Though I can relish a string of rainy Pacific Northwest days, they don’t combine well with heavy doses of hard reality. Not that fairy tales don’t harbor their share of darkness; traditional ones can be downright grim (no pun intended). But…

As an adolescent I skipped over the fascination-with-death phase. Horror movies repelled me, gore disgusted me. I forged on well into my twenties, thousands of miles from elderly relations and still in possession of most of my grandparents, in blithe denial of mortality. It caught up with me, of course, at times slow and furtive…

When I started collecting titles for World Refugee Day, I thought I might be hard pressed to assemble a respectable representation. But the abundance of books that came readily to hand testifies to the importance and relevance of this topic. Circumstances that prompt people to leave behind home, property, and extended family are never felicitous,…

Early in my marriage, my mother-in-law suggested I might someday like to have her wax bust of Shakespeare. I don’t recall my response; I hope it was gracious, though I’m not optimistic on that point. What I thought was, What on earth would I do with it? A couple of decades later, the bust is…

We all make history every day, whether we are the fundamental elements that make up the swift-flowing stream or the droplets that leap out and sparkle in the sunlight. In reflecting on what the women below possessed in common, one answer that turned up was, Not much. Many (but not all) worked hard to develop…