Placitas library celebrates Women’s History Month with writers’ presentation

Placitas Community Library is preparing to mark Women’s History Month in March with a program honoring three female writers.

Hilda Raz, Lynn C. Miller and Lynda Miller are the featured speakers set to discuss the influence of women writers in their lives and share some of their recent writing, including poetry, essays and fiction. The program is at 2 p.m. March 5 in the library’s Gracie Lee Community Room.

Hilda Raz
Courtesy photo

Raz is editor of the Mary Burritt Christiansen Poetry Series at the University of New Mexico Press and poetry editor for Bosque Press in Albuquerque. Among her books is a memoir, “What Becomes You,” written with Aaron Raz Link, a finalist for the Lambda Book Awards in two categories.

Also a teacher, she taught at Harvard, Stanford and other universities. Her poems have been published in Triquarterly, Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, Literature and Medicine, Southern Review, Pleiades, Paterson Literary Review and elsewhere.

She has won numerous prizes for her work as a writer, teacher and editor.

She lives in Placitas.

Raz said 50 years ago, more female poets were publishing books, but only two women professors worked in the Department of English at her college.

“I was a woman writer with ambition, and a teacher and editor working in a field where women were missing,” she said in a news release. “I helped to change that fact. We women learned to help each other write, publish, teach and form communities, a huge and joyous change. Now my ‘Collected Poems’ is here.”

Lynn and Lynda Miller
Courtesy photo

Lynn and Lynda Miller are two of Raz’s publishing partners. They’re co-publishers of Bosque Press and edit a Southwestern fiction series at UNM Press.

“During much of my career in higher education, I taught modernist women writers and adapted their work for the stage,” Lynn said. “For years I researched and developed monologues of the writers Katherine Anne Porter, Gertrude Stein and Edith Wharton and performed them at festivals and Chautauquas. I remain fascinated by human motivation and what lies beneath the surface of dialogue and action. These issues form the core of my most recent novel, ‘The Unmasking,’ which explores the person underneath their various public performances.”

Lynda Miller’s memoir, “More Horses Than Cars,” was published in fall 2021. The book details her life growing up as a cowgirl in Colorado in the 1940s and ‘50s, capturing that time and place and its influence on her.

“My aim in writing it was to give voice to a girl whose best friends were horses and who was most at home in the natural world,” she said.

Lynda is finishing a novel, “Denver Undercover,” featuring a gay undercover cop in Denver in the mid-1950s. The officer is working to solve multiple murders in a dangerous part of the city, while learning to accept his homosexuality during a prejudiced time.

The writers’ presentation is free and open to the public. Masks are required while in the library.

The library is at 453 NM 165 in Placitas. For more information, visit placitaslibrary.com or call 505-867-3355.

Women’s History Month started in 1981 as Women’s History Week, which began March 7, as per a Congressional Act, according to The Library of Congress website on the observance. Congress expanded the observance to the full month in 1987.

Since 1995, according to the website, U.S. presidents have issued annual proclamations designating March as Women’s History Month.