There are more women in this collection than there are countries in the world. That is deliberate. Nations rise and fall, redraw their lines, change their names; I wanted a gathering that owed them nothing. Some of these women have homelands you could find on a map. Some have homelands that were never built — women of a world still unmade. Placed together, they make a quieter argument: that belonging to the human family was never a matter of which line you were born inside. The paper doesn't know its nationality. Neither, finally, does she.
