Nancy K. Miller & Tahneer Oksman 
Feminists Reclaim Mentorship 
An Anthology

Mentorship continues to loom large in stories about women’s work and personal lives— sometimes for the better, but often for the worse. If mentors can nurture and support, they can also bitterly disappoint, reproducing the hardships they once suffered and reinforcing the same old hierarchies and inequities. The stories gathered in
Feminists Reclaim Mentorship challenge our fundamental assumptions about mentorship, illuminating the obstacles that make it difficult to connect meaningfully and ethically while reimagining the possibilities for reciprocity. Does mentorship require sameness? Might we find more inventive, collaborative ways to bond than the traditional top-down model of mentoring? Drawing on their experiences in academia, creative writing, publishing, and journalism, the volume’s editors, Nancy K. Miller and Tahneer Oksman, and their twenty-six contributors collectively strive for relationships that acknowledge differences alongside the importance of common bonds.
Feminists Reclaim Mentorship will resonate across workspaces and arrives at a moment when the need to form feminist connections within and between generations couldn’t feel more urgent.

قائمة المحتويات

Acknowledgments



Introduction: Mutual Engagements


Nancy K. Miller and Tahneer Oksman




Part I. Two-Way Streets: Finding Mentors / Becoming Mentors



Rosemarie’s Hands


Rachel Adams



Tears, Idle Tears: Mentoring English Graduate Students from 1973 to 2010


Susan Gubar



The Making of an Intellectual: Mentoring, Mothering, and a Black Feminist Journey


Michele Faith Wallace



When Am I Supposed to Stop Asking You for Advice?


Hillary Chute



Mentorship: By Any Means Necessary


Sharifa Hampton



The Accidental Mentor


Jennifer Crewe



Can a Therapist Be a Mentor?


Kamy Wicoff



The Reluctant Writer: Looking Back on My Mentors


Sarah Glazer



“That was where I felt most myself “: A Conversation with Sarah Burnes about Books, Mentors, Feminism, and Mothers


Tahneer Oksman



How I Came to America and Discovered Female Mentors


Mikhal Dekel



Rainmaker: How a Mentor Transformed My Destiny


Michelle Yasmine Valladares



Transformative Adaptations: Tracking Fay Gale as a Teacher


Elizabeth Wood



Dear Ant


Aoibheann Sweeney




Part II. Rearview Mirror: Mentoring at a Distance



Ready


Joy Ladin



Mentor Ghosts


Siri Hustvedt



Writing Letters to Ghosts: On Meena Alexander’s Posthumous Mentorship


Ashna Ali




Part III. The Traffic in Mentors: Horizontal Scripts



Widening the Way: An Interview with Dána-Ain Davis


Nancy K. Miller



Navigating Distance and Self-Doubt through Multiple Mentors


Angela Francis



All the Angry Young Women


Elizabeth Alsop



Mentoring and #Me Too


Leigh Gilmore



The Mentor as Mirror


Melissa Coss Aquino



Among Friends


Sarah Chihaya



A Chorus, Not a Monologue


Melissa Duclos



The Group (Text), or the Small Stuff


Sarah Blackwood



On Leaning Out


Laura Limonic



A Special Place in Hell: Women Helping Women and the Professionalization of Female Mentorship


Angela Veronica Wong

عن المؤلف

Nancy K. Miller is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her many books include
My Brilliant Friends: Our Lives in Feminism;
Breathless: An American Girl in Paris;
What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past; and
But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People’s Lives.
Tahneer Oksman is Associate Professor of Academic Writing at Marymount Manhattan College. She is the author of
‘How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?’: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs and coeditor (with Seamus O’Malley) of
The Comics of Julie Doucet and Gabrielle Bell: A Place Inside Yourself.