We're thrilled to virtually celebrate the launch of Sex and the Single Woman, a new anthology that reimagines Cosmo editor Helen Gurley Brown's 1962 cult classic. Contributor Seema Reza will be joined by friends of the anthology Maggie Smith and Teri Ellen Cross Davis for an evening of poetry and conversation about the love and labor of single motherhood.

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This event will be hosted on Zoom. You'll receive the link to the Zoom meeting the day of the event via email. Free registration/ticket sales will end at 6:30pm ET on 8/25. Please email events@whitewhalebookstore.com if you miss this cut-off and need a ticket. For questions, check out our FAQ for events here.

About Sex and the Single Woman:

Sixty years ago, Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl sent shockwaves through the United States, selling more than two million copies in three weeks. Helen’s message was radical for its time: marriage wasn’t essential for women to lead rich, fulfilling lives. Now, in these critical, wry, and expansive essays, twenty-four writers reconsider Helen’s advice and how it applies to their own paths, fielding topics that she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—conceive of in 1962: contraception and abortion (an omission demanded by her publisher), queer and trans womanhood, polyamory, celibacy, interracial dating, bodies of all kinds, consent, sex work, IVF, and the pop culture that both saves and fails us.

Eliza Smith and Haley Swanson’s revisionist anthology honors Brown’s irreverent spirit while also validating our modern experiences of singlehood, encouraging us all to reclaim joy where it’s so often been denied.

About the authors:

Seema Reza is a writer and performer and the author of When the World Breaks Open (Red Hen Press, 2016) and A Constellation of Half-Lives (Write Bloody Publishing, 2019). Based outside of Washington, D.C., she is the CEO of Community Building Art Works, an organization that encourages the use of the arts as a tool for narration, self-care, and socialization among a military population struggling with emotional and physical injuries. In 2015 she was awarded the Colonel John Gioia Patriot Award by USO of Metropolitan Washington-Baltimore for her work with servicemembers. In 2018, the HBO documentary We Are Not Done Yet featured the work of Community Building Art Works. She has taught poetry in classrooms, jails, hospitals, and universities. An alumnus of Goddard College and VONA, her writing has appeared online and in print in McSweeney’s, The Washington Post, The LA Review, The Feminist Wire, HerKind, The Offing, and Entropy, among others, and she has authored case studies that have appeared in Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Related Diseases in Combat Veterans. She has performed at universities, festivals, correctional facilities, and theaters across the country.

Maggie Smith is the author of several books, including Good Bones, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, and the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change. Her poems and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, the Guardian, the Paris Review, Tin House, the Washington Post, The Nation, and The Best American Poetry. Smith is also on the MFA faculty of the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing and serves as an Editor at Large for the Kenyon Review. You can find her on social media @MaggieSmithPoet.

Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the author of a more perfect Union, 2019 winner of The Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize and Haint, winner of the 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. She is the 2022 recipient of the Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award, the 2020 Poetry Society of America’s Robert H. Winner Memorial Prize, and a Cave Canem fellow. She curates the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series and is Poetry Programs manager for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C.