Conversations with Women in Blue
Cyanotypic Dreams
by Beth Kephart
paperback, 240 pages
2027
In Beth Kephart’s new book, Conversations with Women in Blue: Cyanotypic Dreams (forthcoming March 1), imagination and truth merge, blend, and rise as the lives of 55 extraordinary women are refracted through the color blue. In these pages, we encounter Cleopatra meditating on the blue flax along her Nile, Anna Atkins in the midst of cyanotype discoveries, Marie Curie cast in the emanating blue light of radium and of sorrow, and the activist Dolores Huerta taking solace from “Rhapsody in Blue.” Mary Oliver wrote poems that featured the color blue. The Virgin Mary comes to us in iterative blues. Frida Kahlo lived in a blue house, May Morris gave instructions on blue, the white flowers of Vita Sackville West’s flowers seem, at night, to suggest blue, and so the blue stories go. Kephart extends the conversation through lively biographies informed by her own vivid encounters—as a lifelong reader, as a writer of women-centric stories—with those who grace these pages.
In illustrating the book with her own original cyanotypes, Kephart turned to odd artifacts, fragile leaves, tracings, kitchen herbs, burlap, buttons, salt, turmeric, and thread.
This book of poetic monologues and images will inspire those who still dare to dream.
Reviews
Color stirs the eye and prods emotion. This weaving of hues and personas showcases striking figurative language and searching intellect. Spanning eras and geographies, sampling research and wonder, sentences gain complexity and urgency as the writer plunges deeper into meditations and exchanges. . .
—John T. Edge (2025 Porch Prize Creative Nonfiction Judge, citing the winning entry, “Conversations with Women in Blue”)
About the Author
National Book Award finalist Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of more than forty books in multiple genres, an award-winning memoir teacher, an artist whose art appears widely in literary and commercial magazines, and the author of The Hush and the Howl (Substack). Recent books include Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News: A Philadelphia Story (2025 FOREWORD INDIES Editor’s Choice in Fiction) and My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera (2025 Finalist, Pattis Family Foundation Creative Arts Book Award).
