Her greatest reading achievement? Being the first first-grader to read 100 books and sitting in the birthday chair even though it was not her birthday. But it was the $75 gift certificate to a West LA feminist bookstore that changed poet Lynn Melnick the most as a reader. In its stacks, she met Alice Walker, Gloria Anzaldua, Audre Lorde, Adrianne Rich, Rita Dove, and other women writers. She never looked back.

QUOTES

About reading Diane Wakoski: “The rhythms of her words have always been somewhat similar to the way my brain thinks. There are very few authors who I feel are speaking my language, so to speak, and she was always one of those.”

After winning second place and a $75 gift certificate to The Sisterhood Bookstore (a feminist bookstore in LA) in a poetry contest as a community college student: “It had everything I’d never heard of. I discovered everybody. That was a very memorable day in my reading life because…I didn’t know who to look for before.”

“[Alice Walker’s] activism was something that inspired me. Poet as activist…in the literary world and beyond. I always suspected that poetry could do stuff in the world, but she’s always been proof of that.”

“It’s so sad to think there are so few feminist bookstores left in this country. …It’s huge, going to a bookstore where it’s all women! It was great.”

On reading feminist writers: “They let me know that…the things that were happening or had happened to me as a girl and as a young woman were not, that I wasn’t imagining them, and I wasn’t overreacting to them. And that I wasn’t alone. And that one could use one’s voice to change the world.”

“You can’t go wrong with Wuthering Heights, I mean, they’re just so messed up.”

“[Emily Bronte’s poems] exhilarate you even as they destroy you at the same time.”

“I always felt like [Edward Albee] was writing from inside my brain."