NH Women Writing Women

In honor of Women’s History Month, NH Book Festival board member Elaine Loft gathered some selections from New Hampshire women authors who write about women.

Katie Crouch

Katie Crouch is a New York Times bestselling author who now teaches creative writing at Dartmouth College. Her 2021 contemporary novel, Embassy Wife, is about two women searching for the truth about their husbands, the CIA, and their country. The novel is set in Namibia, where Crouch lived with her husband and young children in 2015. The journal she kept about “all the ridiculous things that happened to me” served as the basis of this book.

Sarah McCraw Crow

The Wrong Kind of Woman (2020), by Sarah McCraw Crow, is a novel about a group of women who bring the women’s movement to a small, conservative, college town in New Hampshire. The book is told through alternating perspectives, and is set against a backdrop of the rapid changes of the early Seventies. Crow lives on an old farm in Canterbury with her husband and “almost grown” children. In addition to her own writing she reviews fiction and narrative nonfiction for BookPage and other publications.

Jodi Picoult

In her most recent novel, Jodi Picoult, one of New Hampshire’s best known authors, posits that Emilia Bassano, an actual historical figure and playwright, may have paid an actor named William Shakespeare to front her work. Told in intertwining timelines, By Any Other Name features two women, born two hundred years apart, who are both determined to create something beautiful, despite the prejudices they face. Picoult says, “It is a story of women who have been written out of history by men who write history.” 

Margaret Porter

Margaret Porter is the author of fifteen historical novels. Before she began writing, she worked as an actress, film and television extra, and script writer and producer for documentary and instructional films. Porter’s work of historical fiction, Beautiful Invention, reveals the lesser-known back story of the Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr, who in addition to being a femme fatale, was the co-inventor of a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes. Lamar’s escape from her controlling and possessive Austrian husband, who was providing weapons to Hitler’s regime, is only one of the many dramatic turns in this deeply researched tale.

Lisa Rogak

Lisa Rogak has been writing professionally since 1981. Her book Barack Obama: In His Own Words, hit the New York Times bestseller list. A classically trained pianist, she has spent time in Charleston, SC, Central America, Spain, Panama, Scotland, Switzerland and Mexico, and has now returned to New Hampshire. She’s just published her latest nonfiction work, Propaganda Girls: The Secret War of the Women in OSS. The primary task of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was to create a secret brand of propaganda, with the aim to break the morale of Axis soldiers. Rogak’s book uncovers the true story of four women, a small group of spies whose lives and labors have been largely unknown and untold.

—Elaine Loft