Gender Artist: A mother's poems about raising a queer child in a straight world

At once brilliant and brave, tender and gut-raw, Lee Schwartz's Gender Artist explores and documents a mother's response to her child's gender transformation. These are poems that shatter and satisfy, convincing us that the deeply-examined life is the only kind worth living. Gender Artist is a must-read.  

- Robin Greene, author of The Shelf Life of Fire and Real Birth, Women Share Their Stories



Schwartz uncovers the hard-fought fullness of herself as the mother of someone "not he or she, but all of it." Each poem unlocks a new door, leading us down an unexpected passageway of struggle and understanding.

- Susie Kaufman, retired hospice chaplain and author of Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement (Wipf and Stock).



We all fear for our children. What if our beloved daughter began to wear men's underwear and declared, "I feel more like a man than a woman"? Gender Artist by Lee Schwartz traces the intimate journey of mother and child in moving, beautifully-rendered poems.

- Sonia Pilcer is a poet, playwright, and the author of six novels including The Holocaust Kid.



In Lee Schwartz's storied poems one gender artist is the child "trekking out to pitcher's plate, / leaving her cello on the floor," while the other is the mother, who goes on to find "the man in me." This mother shudders and marvels as her daughter "becomes a man" - her "child as Houdini on 'Who am I?' day" in second grade. Packed with similes and metaphors, these are startling poems that will linger and foment.

- Elaine Sexton, author of Prospect/Refuge