Welcome to Finding Lost Voices!
Finding Lost Voices is a weekly blog dedicated to resurrecting the voices of women who have been marginalized or forgotten.
I have never been someone to listen to the authorities. I was raised by hippies, and since a young age, I questioned the history I was taught. It never seemed to tell the full story, and it always excluded people, especially women. Writing biographies allows me to bring back these voices. But biographies take half a decade to write, and let’s face it, I’ll only be able to write a handful during my lifetime. That’s why I started my Substack, Finding Lost Voices, where I could write a weekly mini-biography about a woman who has been erased or misremembered. So far, I’ve gathered a community of over four thousand people and written over 70 posts. It’s been an amazing experience to foster this community.
Are you ready to start learning about these incredible women? Check one of my more popular posts:
Finding Lost Voices: Joan Vollmer (1923 - 1951), The Ghost in William S. Burroughs Queer and the new film directed by Luca Guadagnino
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Because you want to support this important research. Finding funding to support researching the lives of erased or forgotten women has always been difficult but now it has become nearly impossible. A monthly subscription is only $8 and all of that money is used to support my research.
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Who is Iris Jamahl Dunkle?
Iris Jamahl Dunkle is an award-winning literary biographer, essayist, and poet. Her academic and creative work challenges the Western myth of progress by examining the devastating impact that agriculture and over-population have had, and continue to have, on the North American West. Taking an ecofeminist bent, her writing also challenges the American West’s male-oriented recorded history by researching the lives of women. She obtained her MFA in poetry from New York University and her PhD in American Literature from Case Western Reserve University.
Dunkle was the 2017-2018 Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, CA. Her newest poetry collection West : Fire : Archive was published by Mountain/ West Poetry Series in March 2021. Her other poetry collections include Interrupted Geographies (Trio House Press, 2017) Gold Passage (Trio House Press, 2013) and There's a Ghost in this Machine of Air (Word Tech, 2015). Her poem “Listening to the Caryatids on the Palace of Fine Arts” was featured on 100 buses as part of the San Francisco Beautiful and Poetry Society of America Muni Art 2020 campaign. Her works have been published in Tin House, San Francisco Examiner, Fence, Los Angeles Review of Books, Split Rock Review, Taos Poetry Journal, Pleiades, Calyx, Catamaran, Poet's Market, Women's Studies, and Chicago Quarterly Review.
Her biography Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer was published by the Oklahoma Press (2020 print edition, 2023 audiobook edition). Her bestselling biography Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb was published by the University of California Press Fall 2024.
"A well-researched, empathetic biography."
— Kirkus Reviews
"Many are familiar with The Grapes of Wrath, but few know the author whose work was overshadowed by its publication: Sanora Babb. In Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb, Dunkle examines this fascinating midcentury American, whose meticulous notes and research formed the basis of John Steinbeck’s novel.”
— Alta
“Dunkle’s book may help elevate Babb’s status, not simply because it so thoroughly explores the Steinbeck affair but because it succeeds at doing what all good literary biographies do: It makes a case for reading old writing in new ways.”
— The Atlantic
“As a biographer, Iris Jamahl Dunkle has made it a calling to unearth the ‘lost voices’ of history and literature — talented, creative and accomplished women whose contributions have been underplayed, overlooked, suppressed and in some cases, ripped off.”
— Press Democrat
“By digging deeper, Dunkle uncovers a remarkable rebel — a woman who challenged social and political norms to defend her writing. She illuminates yet another woman forgotten in the annals of literary history. This biography not only revives a vital voice but reminds us of the many stories still buried in the past, ones that deserve to be dug up and told.”
— San Francisco Chronicle
"In contrast to the door-stopping volumes many contemporary biographers favor, Dunkle’s judicious account of Babb’s eventful life focuses on key experiences and relationships in a brisk text with plenty of meat and no fat. Babb comes across as a fiercely independent free spirit, loyal to those she loved. Riding Like the Wind is a welcome addition to the growing shelf of books devoted to enriching the literary canon with more voices and different points of view.”
— The Washington Post
“Who it’s for: Steinbeck fans and haters alike; readers of Kristin Hannah’s The Four Winds and the New York Times Overlooked column; anyone interested in learning more about the Dust Bowl migrants who fled to California hoping for a better life.”
— The Millions
“An exhaustively researched biography.”
— New York Times
"Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s excellent new biography of Babb tells the story of the largely forgotten writer, and Steinbeck has nothing to do with many of the most gripping chapters, which show how Babb’s destitute heartland childhood shaped her keen empathy."
— ARTS
"Writing in fits and starts, being both ahead of her time and told she was 'too late,' Babb perhaps worked against the wind more than she was able to 'ride' it. Yet the recovery of her extraordinary life and career, though long overdue, may at last allow us to say: Babb’s time is now."
— Los Angeles Review of Books
"Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s compassionate and respectful biography, Riding Like the Wind, . . . is filled with tales of a life that was lived to almost tall-tale proportions."
— The New Republic
"This biography revisits the remarkable life of an author whose account of the Great Depression might have been seminal — if John Steinbeck hadn’t barely beaten her to it. But that hardly scratches the surface of a colorful history that also included friendships and affairs with literary luminaries."
— The Washington Post, 50 notable works of nonfiction from 2024
"No novelist captured the relentless devastation of the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, or the cruel treatment of the desperate 'Okies' forced to leave their homes on the Plains for California, better than Sanora Babb. In this biography, Iris Jamahl Dunkle explains why. Hardship, hunger and struggle, discrimination and stubborn prejudice, big dreams thwarted by fate and bad luck––these were also recurring elements of Babb's own remarkable personal story. But she met it all with an indomitable will, a vivaciously free spirit, and an unbending devotion to her artistic vision. Riding Like the Wind is a both heartbreaking and heroic tale that brings to vivid life an important American writer who never received the critical acclaim and commercial success she deserved."—Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan, producers of The Dust Bowl
"In my years of researching the lost historical stories of resilient women, few have resonated with me as much as Sanora Babb. A journalist and writer, she was a true trailblazer and a woman who deserves to be remembered for her contributions to both literature and history. This recognition and remembrance of her work is long overdue. I am thrilled that Dunkle has chosen to shine a light on the heartbreaking story of Babb's life and her remarkable novel about the Dust Bowl and the migration of workers to California during the Great Depression. I hope this book encourages readers to also read Whose Names Are Unknown, Babb's account of the period."—Kristin Hannah, author of The Four Winds and The Women
"Dunkle is doing fascinating work as a biographer and cultural historian and makes it succeed because she is a brilliant and vivid storyteller."—Robert Hass, Poet Laureate of the United States, 1995–1997
"This amazing book has changed forever my sense of what it really means to be an American. Dunkle joins today's ranks of women biographers who blow open a closed canon of novels and novelists with her keenly researched and powerfully written saga of the life and times of Sanora Babb. Babb should be read alongside Steinbeck by every high school kid—and Dunkle shows us why."—Alicia Ostriker, New York State Poet, 2018–2021
"Dunkle, through her extensive research and passion for her subject, brings Sanora Babb, a vibrant woman ahead of her times, to life. And it's about time! Dunkle captures the spirit, not just the facts, of Babb's life. By meticulously reading her letters and other unpublished material, Dunkle gets the reader inside Babb's head and motivations, revealing an even more adventurous and complex life than previously imagined. Thanks to plentiful excerpts from Babb's work, the reader experiences and understands her compassion for the outsider and her intimate connection to nature as told through her lyrical writing style. This will be a movie—no doubt."—Joanne Dearcopp, literary executor, agent, and friend of Sanora Babb
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