A collaborative blog for women who write
“Welcome to Smart Women Write, a collaborative blog we’ve created to foster community and forge connections between women writers like us. Our mission is to offer resources and ideas, and most of all, to explore the vast and complex, fitful but also joyful, process of writing itself.”
That is how the founders introduced the blog in August 2016. Tanya Roth and Angela Sutton held PhDs in history and Bryna R. Campbell a PhD in art history. Later the team included Raquelle K. Bostow, with a PhD in French Studies, and Lynn Clement, with a master’s degree in art history. All of them had, in their words, clocked too many hours of academic writing to count, and all of them still wrote, a lot.
The posts are about the day jobs and the writing that happened around them: finding time to write, raising children while writing, the work-life balance that rarely balanced, and projects bigger and bolder than term papers and dissertations, inside and outside the writers’ original specialties.
The writers
- Tanya Roth, historian of women in the Cold War military and high school history teacher in St. Louis (52 posts)
- Angela Sutton, historian of the Atlantic slave trade, digital humanist and author of the Fort Negley UNESCO nomination (51 posts)
- Raquelle K. Bostow, scholar of French and francophone women’s writing, Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Fisk University (24 posts)
- Bryna R. Campbell, art historian who wrote about leaving academia and starting a business (22 posts)
- Lynn Clement, art historian and community college instructor in the Washington, DC area (17 posts)
- Ange Gillispie, guest writer in 2018 (1 post)
About this archive
The blog went quiet in 2020 and the original site later went offline. This archive puts every post back at its original address, so links from other sites, syllabi and articles still work. The text of each post is kept as its author published it. Sharing buttons, comment forms and widgets are gone, and a few short administrative notes were not carried over.
Where a post deals with something that has changed since, such as the Fort Negley designation or a book that has since been published, a short note marked “Update, October 2026” has been added at the end, clearly separate from the original. Some posts also carry a short set of reader questions.
New essays that reread the archive by theme are collected under Marginalia. Posts can be browsed by year, by writer or by section from the menu.