Women Remaking the World: Kaya Oakes

Our guest Kaya Oakes talks about her recent book The Defiant Middle, which draws on the wisdom of women mystics and explores how transitional eras or living in marginalized female identities can be both spiritually challenging and wonderfully freeing, ultimately resulting in a reinvented way of seeing the world and changing it.

Women are expected to be many things. They should be young enough, but not too young; old enough, but not too old; creative, but not crazy; passionate, but not angry. They should be fertile and feminine and self-reliant, not barren or butch or solitary. Women, in other words, are caught between social expectations and a much more complicated reality.

Kaya Oakes is a journalist and author of several books, including The Nones Are Alright and Radical Reinvention. She teaches writing at UC Berkeley and is a contributing writer for America magazine and speaks on topics related to religion, writing, and feminism from coast to coast and abroad. Her work has received multiple awards, with her essays and journalism appearing in The Guardian, Slate, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, and On Being. She was born and raised in Oakland, California, where she still lives.