Uncertain Girls in Uncertain Times

Uncertain Girls in Uncertain Times encourages young women launching into adulthood to imagine deeply, create bravely, and find the confidence to build a meaningful life in this uncertain and chaotic world. Out with Red Hen Press November 2026.

Pink promotional graphic for “Uncertain Girls in Uncertain Times,” featuring anthology description text and a collage of 40 women’s portraits.

Each one of the forty contributors brings their voice and experience to reflect on a poem that has held particular significance in their life, sharing words of wisdom, vulnerable admissions, and life lessons.

Reflections range from practical advice to philosophical musings, from stories of triumph to somber tellings of the tougher days, while the selected poems fill in the gaps, offering access to invaluable, timeless wisdom.

Interwoven between the poems and essays are snippets of conversation between a mother and her daughter, who is beginning her own launch into adulthood, held over the course of a year.

The goal is to inspire and encourage young thinkers, problem solvers, peacemakers, and creators launching into adulthood to trust their inner authority and find the confidence to build a meaningful life in this uncertain and chaotic world.

“The antidote to fear, I discovered, is not contraction. It is expansion. It is opening yourself up to new things and new people, and living and loving to the fullest extent of your heart.”

—Yazmin Mehdi

“I want to say: be awake to your life. Don’t miss the moment that is in front of you, the person you’re in community with.”

Emily Parzybok

“The one constant in life is that it is ever-changing. And the only thing you actually have control over in these and all moments is your perspective. How do you want to see the world?”

—jeanie chunn

“This discomfort, this desire for another way of being, for more — it’s natural, unstoppable, and right.”

—Angela Garbes

“This poem would end up laying the early foundation for what would become a lifetime and career of being an activist and disruptor, elevating the voices of those who most need to be heard.”

Alison Mariella Désir

“I hope you take into the cup of your hands the food and medicine of this time, the pandemic, and all the ancestral lines back. Take it up into your hands.”

Sara Marie Ortiz

“The personal introductions are authentic and engaging, and there’s a wonderful diversity of sustaining poems. Poetry allows us to be more deeply rooted in the life we’re living, to hold both despair and praise, to see the relationships between seemingly unrelated things, and thus it offers us a window into the oneness of the world.”

—Ellen Bass, author of Indigo and Like a Beggar
“Not since Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet has a book been so urgent and bursting with messages both thrilling and thoughtful of how to walk the uneven path to personhood. This is a book, more than any other, tailor-made for the madness of this moment as women and girls face growing existential threats to their autonomies and anatomies.”

—Putsata Reang, author of Ma and Me
"Uncertain Girls in Uncertain Times emerges as an anthology of our foremost voices and advocates who ignite the wisdom of our time, like the clear flash of a match.”

—E.J. Koh, author of The Magical Language of Others