Last Saturday, I went to BRAVA! for Women in the Arts for the final night of Brian Thorstenson’s Over the Mountain. The play, directed by Raelle Myrick-Hodges, is hard to describe, as so many truly compelling plays are. But it takes place in a war-torn country, our country, and the characters are linked by their relationship to a poet who is eventually jailed and likely killed for her insistence on continuing to write and be read, despite all odds. 

In BRAVA’s lobby, the playwright had posted photos and biographies of wartime poets who inspired him. Looking at that wall of photos, it struck me that I knew and loved poems by most of the male poets on the wall, but could not quote or name the title of any poems written by the women. 

After all this time, women writers still aren’t in our canon. Do we think about that as often as we should? Journalist Laura Collins-Hughes does. I recall a conversation we had when I was working at the O’Neill Theater Center … she noticed that the O’Neill had selected a majority of women playwrights for the Playwrights Conference, and wrote a story about it. Now, she has written an article about the significance of a Pulitzer shortlist “bursting with women.”

Given the scarcity of arts features these days, it is even more significant that Collins-Hughes seizes upon this subject matter. Here’s hoping it is linked far and wide.