Praise for Sisters Born, Sisters Found

Sisters Born, Sisters Found – the anthology edited by Laura McHale Holland – is what great literature is made of. Stories, essays, poems. Themes of identity, spirituality, sexuality, sanity, insanity. We learn the language of sibling connection while cooking for our dolls, propelling a wheelchair down a hospital corridor, or waiting for our sisters to step off the Greyhound bus. We exchange history/her story through interpretation of family secrets and we heal with the gift of female intuition. A treasure volume of sisterhood/womanhood around the world.

— Teresa LeYung-Ryan, author, Love Made of Heart: the Mother-Daughter Love Story and Talking to My Dead Mom monologues

Powerful, intelligent entertaining stories of sisters illustrate the power and freedom in being born female. No sister relationship is casual; all sisters are bonded, not only be their feminine interests, but by their instincts to hold together the world in wise and often surreptitious ways. Even French sisters committing ghastly murders baffle us by generating in us reluctant understanding and sympathy.

— Kay Mehl Miller, Ph.D, author, Love Comes At Twilight: A Love Story for Seniors; Living With the Stranger in Me: An Exploration of Aging; and Talking It Over: Understanding Sexual Diversity

How refreshing to swing around this great, big world of ours following the stories of sisters. Whether factual or imagined, narrative or poetic, the short works in this appealing collection ring true. They’re told in all kinds of voices inflected with the music(s) of all kinds of cultures, and yet, they share a mutual esteem for sisterhood in its many manifestations. Not every sister here is admirable—how could they be to ring true?—but their stories accrue, re-calling us to memory, revealing others’ lives.

— Amanda McTigue, author, Going to Solace

More than an anthology of sibling stories, Sisters Born, Sisters Found is a diverse and compelling recollection of self-affirming, private connections—the sharing of insecurities, secret mischiefs, sad moments, partings, even an indestructible Arab-Israeli sistership. Although they share a commonality, each story is refreshingly unto itself.

— H.B. Reid, author, The Adventures of Charles T. Woolley,The Diary of Count Frederigo Alfieri, The Connected

What happens in this exquisite array of the spectrum of ‘sisterhood’ is discovery of new poets and writers who deserve a louder voice, a chance to talk about women in ways too often usurped by whispering – those myriad details of owning homogametic XX chromosomes that attracts yet deeply, philosophically distances the XY gender. These are songs of linking, love, need, compassion, yearning for some semblance of sameness that makes two women sisters… For women this is not simply an anthology: this is the definition of ‘sister’. For men it is a Diogenes lantern as a guide to understand or appreciate that elusive bond.

— Grady Harp, poet/author/historian, War Songs, The Art of Man,Vitruvian Lens