A poem by Alice Walker, from her collection Hard Times Require Furious Dancing, calls on the grandmother spirit and on us to clear the way for wise women today, and tomorrow.

I have fleeting, but specific, memories of my great-grandmother, Edna Hellman, or “Grandy,” as my father and everyone else called her.

The story of my great-grandmother, Rosa Puron Garcia, is really my father Domingo Barros’s story.

Being a mother is something that tears through the skin, leaving deep scars. It means to inhabit one’s own history, while living outside oneself.

“She was really my mother and she loved me to death, and I knew it because she would show me, I used to feel it, and she would give me anything that she had.”

My grandmother, who I called Nana, was the best-dressed woman in all of Berlin, or so my mother used to say.

My grandmother’s family was on the other side of the mountain when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima seventy-five years ago.

I have a grandmother I never got to meet. She was my father’s mother, Jean Hellman.

I never met my grandmother, whose name was Tillie (Chaya Taube) Green; she died when I was just a few weeks old.

A poem about the author's maternal grandmother, Florence Hooton, 1912-1988.

It was a big deal when my grandmother bought the land on Carver Road in the 1970s to build her dream home.

I almost never made it into this world due to China’s notorious one-child policy.

When I was little she showed me how to dance in the kitchen. One knee raised, arms bent 90 degrees at the elbow...

A couple of months ago, while having lunch with my Dad, I reminded him that my great-grandmother, Sara, had come to America alone...

In August of 1936, my family, Mom, Dad, Nona, and I, were returning from Europe on the Conte di Savoia.

My great-aunt Florence (Florence Carey) was born in 1907 and died at 96 in 2003. She was never married and not an actual grandmother...