HER KIND readers, we need to hear from you! In honor of HK’s first year anniversary, we want, in exactly 111 words, a flash fiction/nonfiction piece about one of your first summers of mischief/coming-of-age/ocean discoveries/etc. Tell us your out of body, discovering your otherness, your coming into, your most terrifying, your most formative summer. We plan to run our favorites in our Global Women feature in July. Email your flash in the body of the email to: Tellhk2013@gmail.com Deadline: June 15, 2013.

Over the years, I worked as cook, secretary, landscaper, sporting towel folder, greenhouse worker. I attended night school, community college, applied for every grant I could get my hands on so I could finish my undergraduate degree at Berea College, where I was a weaver and a teaching assistant as I studied literature and philosophy. After graduation, I found myself employed at a childcare center. On the phone one day a friend from college asked me just what I thought I was doing, anyway, surrounded by thirty children and oceans of spilled milk. Soon I applied for more schooling. I [Read more]

  1. Sign up for the Traversée De La Gaspésie, a weeklong cross-country ski adventure across the Gaspé peninsula in Quebec, with minimal training and partial French. Do the TDLG with complete strangers, no friends, family, or even fellow Californians, to comfort you in your cluelessness. 2. Once you realize your head won’t explode from the rapid-fire Quebecois you are attempting to translate in your partial French, enjoy the nine-hour bus ride from Quebec City to the Parc national de la Gaspésie. Observe the snow-draped countryside—here a twinkling icicle, there a winter-naked branch reaching for the ever-greying sky. 3. Find [Read more]

“When I was a youngster, those nimble days of yore in the New York City hood of the ’60s, I stood on the sidelines waiting for my turn, to ready my undaunted stance against the two criss-crossing ropes in motion and with the utmost precision leapt into the jump zone of the BADDEST double dutch played on the streets of the South Bronx. New Yorkers who grew up in the ghetto will remember this ghetto-Olympics sport, a test of physical dexterity, speed, timing, and stamina—the swiftest and most agile Boricua and black sistahs from the block doing ‘the running man’ [Read more]

Except for the vicarious viewing of Scarlett Ohara’s sprawling Tara Plantation backdrop in her torrid, tempestuous love scenes with the handsome Rhett Butler in the classic movie Gone with the Wind, I never experienced the deep South. Nor had I ever personally met an African American actress of stage and Hollywood fame. But Atlanta was always on my bucket list of places to see—next to another unfulfilled wish to one day become an author. Both paths converged into one memorable writer’s journey to the Writer’s Well retreat, the summer of 2012. It all began the day I won the Writer’s [Read more]

In Heiwadai, Tokyo, I read nearly thirty American romance novels in just under six months. Each followed a simple formula: introduce a tragic heroine, who’s been hurt and can no longer trust. Introduce a love interest whom the heroine instantly detests. Allow the heroine’s abhorrence to falter—diluted by an undeniable attraction—until the love interest betrays her, and she regrets having warmed to him. Reveal that the betrayal was not in fact a betrayal, but a misunderstanding or rough patch. Let the love interest shudder with passion—the heroine clutch him to her breast in an incendiary confession: at last, their love [Read more]

When men are oppressed, it’s a tragedy. When women are oppressed, it’s tradition. -Letty Cottin Pogrebin Female Genital Cutting. Some refer to it as Female Circumcision; others call it Female Genital Mutilation. As a child, I knew it as khatna. No matter the name, it is the process of removing part or all of the female genitalia. Within the Dawoodi Bohra religious community, it is a ritual performed on young girls. According to the UN, it is a violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and a practice criminalized in the United States by the Illegal Immigration Reform and [Read more]

In December 2007, Toronto teenager Aqsa Parvez was murdered by her father and brother. The media coverage of the case was intense, throwing a harsh spotlight on the Muslim South Asian community in Canada. The voices missing belonged to young Muslim and South Asian women: the same groups whose rights and personhood were being defended publicly by organizations and institutions claiming to speak on these young women’s behalf. In response, a group of Muslim women founded AQSAzine to create a space for their voices deliberately left out of mainstream conversations. One of the co-founders of AQSAzine was Farrah Khan, whom was named one of [Read more]

In early 2010, while researching another project, I became interested a small, U.S./Rwanda–based organization Global Grassroots, which I then interviewed and followed for much of the next two years. The organization partners with some the world’s most vulnerable women—genocide widows, HIV-positive women, and those living in severely impoverished areas of post-conflict Africa—to build self-sustaining nonprofits dedicated to the safety, education, and advancement of women and girls. Through the program, Rwandan women have launched social justice projects that are entirely community-designed and run, and after an initial training period and small start-up grant from Global Grassroots, also self-funding. They are reinventing [Read more]