40+ of Your Favorite Nonfiction Reads by Women

40+ of Your Favorite Nonfiction Reads by Women This Riot Recommendation is sponsored by  All the Women in My Family Sing: Women Write the World: Essays on Equality, Justice, and Freedom edited by Deborah Santana. All the Women in My Family Sing is a vital collection of prose and poetry by women of color, with topics that range from the pressures of being the vice-president of a Fortune 500 Company, to escaping the killing fields of Cambodia, to the struggles inside immigration, identity, romance and self-worth. The brief, trenchant essays capture the aspirations and wisdom of these powerful women as they exercise autonomy, creativity, and dignity and build bridges to heal the brokenness in todays turbulent world. Women have produced some edifying and entertaining nonfictionâ€"from philosophy to history to essays and everything in between. We wanted to know: what are your favorite works of nonfiction by women? And wow, did you tell us! Below youll find more than forty recommendations from your fellow Riot readers. Minor Characters by Joyce Johnson My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness by Nagata Kabi All the Single Ladies by Rebecca Traister A Girl Named Zippy by Haven Kimmel Holding the Line by Barbara Kingsolver The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion Drift by Rachel Maddow The Woman Who Would Be King: Hatshepsut’s Rise to Power in Ancient Egypt by Kara Cooney A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf Invincible by Amy Lawrence Just Kids by Patti Smith Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood Men Explain Things to Me by Rebecca Solnit Shirley Jackson: A Very Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady’s Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners by Therese Oneill The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman Blood Will Tell by Kyra Cornelius Kramer Unsportsmanlike Conduct by Jessica Luther Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag Thinking in Pictures by Temple Grandin Clever Maids by Valerie Paradiz The House on Beartown Road by Elizabeth Cohen The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman In Order to Live by Yeonmi Park Thru Hiking Will Break Your Heart by Carrot Quinn Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala Against Our Will by Susan Brownmiller My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor Get Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them by Jennifer Wright Brain on Fire by Susanna Cahalan Don’t Look Back, We’re Not Going That Way by Marcia Wallace I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai Letting Go of God by Julia Sweeney The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson Concussion by Jeanne Marie Laskas Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot Seabiscuit by Laura Hillenbrand And y’all are fans of anything by Roxanne Gay, Mary Roach, Barbara Ehrenreich, Annie Dillard, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and Sarah Vowell!