Her Writing
Influenced by:
James Baldwin, Carolyn Forche, Susan Griffin, Linda Hogan and W.S. Merwin.
Your Verdict: A Judge’s Reckoning with Law and Loss: a Memoir of Race, Law, Family, and Poetry
SNEAK PREVIEW from Your Verdict: A Judge’s Reckoning with Law and Loss
A journalist once asked me how I’ve managed to overcome so much in my life. The question stunned me. It had never occurred to me that I had overcome anything. I was just living my life. What she was referring to, of course, was that, compared with many judges, my life has been unconventional. A working class background. Interracial marriage. Welfare mother, Feminist. Community activist. Bi-sexuality. Poetry. What bothers me about the question is the idea of overcoming something, as if I had to conquer my own life, when this life I’ve been making has also been making me. I am a part of so many of the extraordinary, ordinary events and people in court. People like myself, who try to face life and need a little help doing so.
Beyond Portia: Women, Law and Literature in the United States
Feminist Legal / Literary Anthology of Poetry & Fiction published by Northeastern University Press
By suggesting that women lawyers move beyond Portia, the traditional patriarchal symbol of female perfection in the law, we hope to encourage the invention of new paradigms that will split open our thinking about these questions and move us beyond the binaries of male/female, insider/outsider, rights/caring, and justice/mercy.
The Drama of the Long Distance Runners
Published in Thinking Women: Introduction to Women’s Studies, Kendall-Hunt, 1995.
I watch you in the court
House coffee shop. Sitting next to
The angry young woman. The one with
A newborn tied to her chest. Fear
And despair criss-cross her back. You…