A spellbinding debut novel about the trailblazing Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad, who defied society's expectations to find her voice and her destiny. "Remember the flight, for the bird is mortal." All through her childhood in Tehran, Forugh Farrokhzad is told that Persian daughters should be quiet and modest. She is taught only to obey, but she always finds ways to rebel--gossiping with her sister among the fragrant roses of her mother's walled garden,...

June 1937. Elizabeth Bishop, still only a young woman and not yet one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century, arrives in France with her college roommates. They are in search of an escape, and inspiration, far from the protective world of Vassar College where they were expected to find an impressive husband, a quiet life, and act accordingly. But the world is changing, and as they explore the City of Light, the larger threats of fascism...

A fictionalized account of the life of Friedrich von Hardenberg, a late-eighteenth-century German philosophy student, who later becomes the Romantic poet Novalis, focusing on his infatuation with twelve-year-old Sophie von Kuhn.

Presents a novelized account of the last months of poet Sylvia Plath's life after she left her marriage and tried to make a new home for her two young children while completing a collection of poems and struggling to maintain her mental equilibrium.

Disguising herself as a man to escape her loveless marriage and enjoy the exclusive freedoms of men, aspiring writer Aemilia Lanier falls in love and runs away with ragged poet William Shakespeare, with whom she secretly writes plays that bring him fame years later.

Simonides of Keos lived during the fifth and sixth centuries BC, a fertile period for the arts, when myths were being acted out and verse had just begun to be written down. In this evocative portrayal of Simonides, the poet is learning to master his craft and secure fickle patrons, and his travels place him at the scene of many central historical events. This fact, along with his friendship with gallivanting, brilliant Anakreon, makes him a perfect...

"Original and illuminating."-The New York Times Book Review In her most ambitious work since In the Time of Butterflies, Julia Alvarez tells the story of a woman whose poetry inspired one Caribbean revolution and of her daughter whose dedication to teaching strengthened another. Camila Henriquez Urena is about to retire from her longtime job teaching Spanish at Vassar College. Only now as she sorts through family papers does she begin to know...

Exiled for their religious beliefs in 1875, five nuns embark on a voyage to America, only to lose their lives when the ship runs aground, in a tale that inspires a grand poem by a doomed priest and Oxford scholar living in literary exile.

"From USA Today bestselling author of Flight of the Sparrow Amy Belding Brown comes an evocative new novel about Emily Dickinson's longtime maid, Margaret Maher, whose bond with--and ultimate betrayal of--the poet ensured Dickinson's work would live on. Massachusetts, 1869. Margaret Maher has never been one to settle down. At twenty-seven, she's never met a man who has tempted her enough to relinquish her independence to a matrimonial fate, and she...

A fictional exploration of the life of Emily Dickinson explores her relationships with her tempestuous sister-in-law, her brooding father, and the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, who may have inspired some of her greatest poems and letters.