GRACE AND GRAVITY

Volume VIII

Book Design Credit: Nita Congress

Grace in Darkness is the long-awaited eighth volume of the “Grace and Gravity” series, a literary journal devoted to women writers in the DC region. This volume is the first edited by Melissa Scholes Young, a DC writer and professor, who has taken over the task of assembling this journal from the previous editor and founder Richard Peabody (founder and editor also of Gargoyle). Young delivers us a gorgeous and vivid volume of twenty-five vibrant voices. Her vision for the eighth volume is a platform in which women speak – shout, whisper, bellow, and sing – unapologetically and with a confidence so often stripped from women and girls in a society built from a blueprint with a glass ceiling. Amidst the darkness provided in generous and unrelenting doses by the current political climate, this collection delivers a compilation of stories with undeniable light – and, of course, grace. Young writes in the introduction of Grace in Darkness :

These are women writers with guts. Their courage doesn’t need nor ask permission…
Dark shadows remain, yet there is light and amazing grace from these depths.