Foreword / by Pam Grossman -- Emily Brontë: watcher off the moors, fantasy, and cruel romance -- Octavia Butler: sower of strange seeds, species, and the future -- Shirley Jackson: witch of villages, horrors, and omens -- Eileen Chang: enchantress of bitter love, treachery, and jewels -- Sylvia Plath: fury of motherhood, marriage, and the moon -- Toni Morrison: queen of miracles, generations, and memory -- Anna Akhmatova: koldunya of winter, endurance, and willows -- Joy Harjo: cosmic traveller of crows, horses, and survival -- Flannery O'Connor: seer of peacocks, weird country people, and glass eyes -- Sappho: siren of the lyre, honey, and ruins -- Forugh Farrokhzad: rebel of sensual love, green gardens, and perfume -- Emily Dickinson: specter of windows, flies, and the unexpected -- Audre Lorde: warrior witch of otherness, bodies electric, and sisterhood -- Angela Carter: fairy godmother of bloody tales, the circus, and mirrors -- Virginia Woolf: guardian of the waters, the porcelain, and the lexicon -- Sandra Cisneros: hechicera de los nombres, las casas, y la soledad -- Charlotte Perkins Gilman: soothsayer of utopias, creeping women, and evil wallpaper -- Jamaica Kincaid: sorceress of islands, venom, and histories -- Anne Carson: high priestess of scholars, volcanoes, and eros -- Leslie Marmon Silko: storyteller of rattlesnakes, turquoise, and the sacred desert -- Alejandra Pizarnik: fantasma of silence, death, and lilacs -- Mirabai: dakini of holy ecstasy, the Dark One, and ankle bells -- Anaïs Nin: undine of introspection, opulent dreams, and voyages -- Gertrude Stein: madame of roses, geometry, and repetition -- Yumiko Kurahashi: sibyl of masks, extraterrestrial eggs, and twisted fantasies -- Agatha Christie: Grand Dame of trickery, murder, and teatime -- Janet Frame: hermit of hospitals, belonging, and lost souls -- María Sabina: shaman of dew, hummingbirds, and mushroom language -- Mary Shelley: alchymist of monsters, children, the living and the dead -- Zora Neale Hurston: conjurer of hurricanes, zombies, and tall tales.