Land of Women

Curtis Bauer is an American writer and translator. He is the author of three poetry collections, most recently American Selfie. He has translated poetry and prose from Spanish for Fabio Morábito, Luis Muñoz, Juan Antonio González Iglesias, and Jeannette L. Clariond, including Image of Absence, which received the 2020 International Latino Book Award for the Best Nonfiction Book Translation from Spanish to English. Bauer is the publisher and editor of Q Avenue Press Chapbooks and translations editor for The Common. He teaches comparative literature and creative writing at Texas Tech University in Lubbock.

Maria Sanchez is obsessed with what she cannot see. As a field veterinarian following in the footsteps of generations before her, she travels the countryside of Spain bearing witness to a life eroding before her eyes-words, practices, and people slipping away because of depopulation, exploitation of natural resources, inadequate environmental policies, and development encroaching on farmland and villages. Sanchez, the first woman in her family to dedicate herself to what has traditionally been a male-dominated profession, rebuffs the bucolic narrative of rural life often written by-and for consumption by-people in cities, describing the multilayered social complexity of people who are proud, resilient, and often misunderstood.

Sanchez interweaves family stories of three generations with reflections on science and literature. She focuses especially on the often dismissed and undervalued generations of women who have forgone education and independence to work the land and tend to family. In doing so, she asks difficult questions about gender equity and labor.

Part memoir and part rural feminist manifesto, Land of Women acknowledges the sacrifices of Sanchez's female ancestors who enabled her to become the woman she is. A bestseller in Spain, Land of Women promises to ignite conversations about the treatment and perception of rural communities everywhere.