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VANCOUVER Wash - December 21 is National Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day, an event launched in 1990 by the National Coalition for the Homeless, National Consumer Advisory Board and the National Health Care for the Homeless Council and honored in cities and towns across the country with annual vigils and services. Seattle has upped the ante on the annual vigil. Since 2000, homeless and formerly homeless activists with Seattle’s Women in Black movement have held more than 400 vigils—standing in silent protest each time a person has died homeless in their community.

Seattle’s Women in Black and the deaths of homeless people in one of the “most livable” cities in the United States are central foci of “No Room of her Own: Women’s Stories of Homelessness, Life, Death and Resistance,” ([Palgrave Macmillan, Sept. 13, 2011) written by Desiree Hellegers, associate professor of English and a founding co-director of the Center for Social and Environmental Justice at Washington State University Vancouver. Based on extended interviews with 15 women, gathered over the course of nearly 20 years, the book illuminates the physical challenges of homelessness on bodies already compromised by arthritis, high blood pressure, strokes, sickle cell anemia and the harrowing conditions, including routine threats of sexual and physical violence, that confront “the other one percent” of Americans.

Hellegers’ work on homelessness dates back to her volunteer work in Washington, D.C.-area shelters as an undergraduate. Then in the mid-1980s, she spent a year working—and living—at a shelter for women and children in Seattle. But beginning with her first experience of standing with Women in Black following the 2006 murder of Douglas Dawson, a 51-year-old amputee who was sleeping on the streets of Spokane when he was set on fire in his wheelchair, Women in Black opened a new window for Hellegers into the potentially lethal consequences of spending even a single night homeless in the United States.

“This man only had one leg and they set him on fire. This is what society has become. When you get burned to death in a wheelchair, that’s just as low as it can go,” Mona Joyner, one of the activist-narrators in “No Room of her Own” observed.

The reviews are in

“’No Room of her Own’ will take its place next to Liebow's “Tell Them Who I Am,” as a definitive contemporary human document on the lives of homeless women," said Mitch Duneier, Maurice P. During professor of sociology at Princeton University

"Some of my deepest conversations have been with wise homeless sisters of all colors on the underside of America—yet they have a rich understanding of America! Don't miss this book!" said Cornel West, Princeton University.

“Heartbreaking and inspiring stories of courageous women enduring and triumphing over adversity few of us can imagine. Desiree Hellegers brilliantly collates and connects the stories of disparate homeless women. We learn much about these citizens with no addresses. They have been studied to death but rarely do we hear their voices. Hellegers skillfully and with compassion weaves the tapestry of these women’s testimonies. From Sweet Pea to Debra and Marlowe, their accounts of survival and dignity reveal hidden truths of gender relations and our political and social culture. ‘No Room of Her Own’ breaks the silences surrounding the national disgrace of homelessness. These women must be heard,” said David Barsamian, founder and director of Alternative Radio.

"After reading ‘No Room of Her Own,’ I’m more convinced than ever that unless we bend toward justice, years hence, our children will look back upon current policies—that are producing poverty and homelessness alongside peopleless homes—as a societal experiment that is far worse than the Tuskegee study, in which the ravages of syphilis were studied while the individuals were left untreated,” said Stephen Bezruchka M.D., M.P.H., School of Public Health, University of Washington.

Hellegers is also the author of “Handmaid to Divinity: Natural Philosophy, Poetry, and Gender in Seventeenth-Century England” (2000).

“No Room of Her Own: Women's Stories of Homelessness, Life, Death, and Resistance”

Palgrave Macmillan ISBN: 978-0-230-11658-0

MEDIA CONTACT

Desiree Hellegers, College of Liberal Arts, �鶹��ý, 503-927-1709, desiree.hellegers@vancouver.wsu.edu

Lindsey Ruthen, Associate Publicist, Palgrave Macmillan, 646-307-5659, Lindsey.Ruthen@palgrave-usa.com