Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Red Dirt Click Here

Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie

An exquisite memoir of growing up dirt poor in Oklahoma. According to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “Love of the land is not located so much in the mind, or in the heart, as in the skin—how the skin feels when you go back.”

When the peasants are deprived of fields to work, so goes the chorus of an old Irish ballad, “All that’s left is a love of the land.” In this exquisite rendering of her childhood in rural Oklahoma—from the Dust Bowl days to the end of the Eisenhower era—writer and journalist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz bears witness to a family and community that still clings to the dream of America as a republic of landowners.

Outlaw Woman A Memoir of the War Years

In 1968, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz helped found the Women’s Liberation Movement—part of what has been called the second wave of feminism in the United States. Along with a small group of dedicated women in Boston, she produced the first women’s liberation journal, No More Fun and Games.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz was also an antiwar and anti-racist activist and organizer throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, and she was a fiery, tireless public speaker on issues of patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism, and racism. She worked in Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade and formed associations with other revolutionaries across the spectrum of radical politics, including the Civil Rights Movement, Students for a Democratic Society, the Revolutionary Union, the African National Congress, and the American Indian Movement.

Unlike most of those involved in the New Left, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up poor, female, and part Native American in rural Oklahoma. She often found herself at odds not only with the ruling class, but also with the Left and with the women’s movement.

 Outlaw WomanClick Here

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s odyssey from Oklahoma poverty to the urban New Left gives a working-class, feminist perspective on a time and a movement that forever changed American society. In a new afterword of Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960-1975, the author reflects on her fast-paced life fifty years ago—in particular as a movement activist and in relationships with men.

Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War

Human rights activist and historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has been described as “a force of nature on the page and off.” That force is fully present in Blood on the Border: A Memoir of the Contra War, this third in her acclaimed series of memoirs. Seamlessly blending the personal and the political, Blood on the Border is Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s firsthand account of the decade-long dirty war pursued by the Contras and the United States against the people of Nicaragua.

 Blood on the BorderClick Here