Erin Belieu Quotes

United States, Poet
September 25, 1965

Erin Belieu is an American poet. Belieu was born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska, graduating from Central High School. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, where she learned how to construct poetry. Belieu then attended Boston University, and Ohio State University receiving advanced degrees in the area of poetry.

One of the realities for women writers is that sometimes you'll start strong, but as you see people go up the ladder, working in their literary lives, getting prizes and awards and the better teaching gigs, women tend to sort of drop away.

Erin Belieu
I know there's a part of the feminist world that is like, "Hey, screw 'em, we'll do our own thing over here," and I can see there's a value in that. But a kind of nudgy part of me thinks: No. I want access, and I want my daughters to have access to the exact same thing, because we all know there's no such thing as separate but equal.

Erin Belieu

If you go off into general-interest magazines, often women are being shoved aside into various ghettos that perpetuate the problem. Women's interests are specialized, they're secondary; they're somewhere over to the side of the serious work that's being done. Throughout history, there have been ladies' magazines, ladies' journals, and for years there have been women writers who would refuse to participate in women-only sort projects because of that stigma.

Erin Belieu
- Problem
- Serious
- Interest