These are the proceedings of the First Conference on Women Writers from Latin America which took place at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1975. The volume combines creative and critical writing, as is the editorial policy of the journal.

The scholarly articles reflect the descriptive, comparative nature of many oral presentations and contribute valuable information on writers not often anthologized or studied. Two of them focus on a sociological context: “Women Intellectuals in Chilean Society” and “An Interview with Women Writers in Colombia.” The contributions specifically centered on the literary production of women present a well-balanced combination of genres: on narrative, articles on the nineteenth-century Peruvians Clorinda Matto de Turner and Mercedes Cabello de Carbonera and the Colombian Soledad Acosta de Samper, the Venezuelan Teresa de la Parra, the Argentines María Angélica Bosco, Beatriz Guido, and Silvina Bullrich, the Mexicans Nellie Campobello and Elena Poniatowska, and the Cuban Lydia Cabrera; on drama, selections about the Puerto Rican Myrna Casas, the Argentine Griselda Gambaro, and the Mexicans Luisa Josefina Hernández and Elena Garro; on poetry, articles on the Mexican Sor Juana, the Chilean Gabriela Mistral, the Uruguayan Sara de Ibáñez, and the Puerto Rican Julia de Burgos. Beth Miller’s “A Random Survey of the Ratio of Female Poets to Male in Anthologies: Less-than-Tokenism as a Mexican Tradition” is a well researched piece on the “politics of exclusion” which analyzes why Latin American women writers are not included in national collections.

Authors of the articles are professors and critics of Latin American literature in the United States, and creative work includes poetry by the Cubans Silvia Barros, Maya Islas, Mireya Robles, and Gladys Zaldívar, the Brazilian Teresinha Pereira, the Puerto Ricans Olga Casanova-Sánchez and Iris Zavala, and the chicana Angela de Hoyos. As a collection, the volume succeeds in putting together new and exciting material. It achieves a rightly seasoned mix of the classic and the contemporary, and it introduces the reader to some perspectives that are worth considering.