Co-editor (with Annette Bennington McElhiney)
This pioneering anthology presents a multicultural, interdisciplinary collage of women’s experiences with the law by mixing creative and analytical writings about family, abuse, and community in the context of feminist legal and literary theories. Beyond Portia opens with grounding essays in both literary and legal theory, and offers two collections of essays, stories, and poems that focus in turn on law and literature on families, and law and literature on abuse of women. Drawing on the idea that literature by women can offer material richer than the typical case fact pattern used in traditional legal training, the editors show that both literature and literary methods of reading can help articulate otherwise unspoken premises in legal decision-making, bringing them into the open for examination.
The Shawl of Midnight is a coming-of-age story, a family saga, and a hero’s journey set in a world between worlds. Politically, Kashmir is land contested by Pakistan and India. Spiritually, the mind responds to the dark silence between midnight and the sky’s uncertain protection. Here is a world of birds who know no boundaries, of wide-ranging mountains that seem to have been arising forever from nothing at all, and of multiple sister-rivers that create all the forms of life itself. The novel asks how people process their family traumas, their religious impulses, their countries’ constraints, the ways they present themselves to others—and to themselves. The Shawl of Midnight explores the depths of family relationships, how people change over time and distance, and how we might discover through our own pressures and actions what we are shaped by--exactly what we are made of, and where home truly is.
Half of the author’s proceeds will go to two humanitarian service organizations, one in Jammu and Kashmir, India and in Lahore, Pakistan.