A New Classic: ABORTION STORIES, Launch Event & Conversation

Penguin Classics presents , a one-of-a-kind, intersectional volume of abortion representation in American literature before Roe v. Wade that compellingly proclaims: when abortion is illegal, people’s lives are always more precarious and limited.

Join us for a conversation with Karen Weingarten (Editor), Rebecca Traister (Foreword), and Renee Bracy Sherman (Afterword) who will discuss these stories, poems, essays, and memoirs that reflect a range of representations and responses to abortion.

Featuring luminaries like Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Edgar Allan Poe, Lucille Clifton, Eugene O’ Neill, and Shirley Chisholm, as well as rare firsthand accounts of abortion providers and seekers, this reproductive justice-minded collection brings together diverse representations of abortion to show how access to abortion is often race and class dependent, and demonstrates how the repercussions of an illegal abortion also vary depending on such factors.

The need and desire to have an abortion goes back centuries, and these literary representations of abortion before Roe compellingly argue for the necessity of legal and accessible abortion.

Renee Bracey Sherman is an abortion activist, founder and co-executive director of We Testify, and the co-author of LIBERATING ABORTION: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve.

Rebecca Traister is writer at large for New York magazine. She is the author of Good and Mad, All the Single Ladies, and the award-winning Big Girls Don’t Cry.

Karen Weingarten is Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York. Her previous books are Abortion in the American Imagination: Before Life and Choice and Pregnancy Test.

This event is free and open to all, please register to attend. Copies of the book will be available at the event. Click here for more information about this event.
Tue, Mar 4, 2025
6:00 PM–8:00 PM

The Skylight Room (9100), CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave, NYC

Host or Publisher The Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY