by Madeleine Nesbitt It’s a new year, which means it’s time for new reading lists, and, in our case, the kick-off of the 2015 SPARK Book Club. Each month, we’ll be posting a review of a book (fiction or nonfiction, prose or poetry). This year, we’ll be joining the #ReadPOC2015 campaign, reading and reviewing books…
by Madeleine Nesbitt Umbral is a comic that very much depicts the hero’s adventure story– that of King Arthur, or perhaps Frodo Baggins. There’s magic, thievery, a kingdom at risk, and secrets galore. Any typical male adventure hero would fit into this environment, but, thanks to creators Antony Johnston and Christopher Mitten, this comic isn’t…
by Madeleine Nesbitt Despite the fact that the first known novel was penned by a woman, the devaluation of female-produced literature has presided over the literary arts since they came to exist. Women continue to go by initials in hopes of being taken for a man (example a: J.K. Rowling), and the 2013 VIDA Count points out that women…
by Maya Brown, Sam Holmes, and Madeleine Nesbitt In the past couple of weeks, the media has blown up about why the first female executive editor of the New York Times, Jill Abramson, was fired. Some sources claimed that she was fired because she brought in a lawyer to talk with her boss, Arthur Sulzberger,…
by Montgomery Jones, Madeleine Nesbitt, Mehar Gujral, Lilinaz Evans, Georgia Luckhurst, and Ben Ubiñas You’ve probably seen that American Eagle’s Aerie brand has released a new ad campaign featuring models who have not been retouched. The taglines for the campaign include “love me, don’t retouch me,” “Love the Real you,” and “The Real you is…
by Madeleine Nesbitt “I seem to have run in a great circle, and met myself again on the starting line.”– Jeanette Winterson, author of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit It has been a year of books here at SPARK. In January 2013, we embarked on The Hiding Spot’s Feminist Reads Challenge– a quest to…
by Madeleine Nesbitt In his recent Fireside Hangout, President Obama talked about taking the initiative to interest girls and women in STEM careers, where women are extremely underrepresented. A step to getting more girls interested in these kinds of careers is having examples of modern women in these fields. One such woman is the cooler-than-cool Emily…
From Beyonce to Rihanna to Taylor Swift to Adele, the pop music landscape is not exactly hurting for women right now. But we could always use a few more ladies killin’ it in the music scene, right?! Some of the SPARKteam came together to talk about their fave female musicians, songwriters, singers, and female-fronted bands,…