This stimulating book examines the experience of women artists in the American West. The women studied here range from Joseppa Dick, Pomo basketmaker, to Georgia O'Keeffe; from dancer Isadora Duncan to African-American writer Ntozake Shange and dozens of other women who lived in a fertile crescent that Jensen calls the Pacific Southwest during the last century.

By recovering the work of so many writers, painters, photographers, and craftswomen, Jensen expands the history of women in the West. She also explores the cultural climate necessary to support creative work and considers questions of tradition and memory, examining the forms available to writers such as Buffalo Bird Woman, Christine Quintasket, Ruth Benedict, Sui Sin Far, and Agnes Smedley. Finally she engages the theories of history and creativity that determine what society chooses to remember and preserve.