El León Literary Arts: Ms. Aligned 3, Edited by Rebecca Thomas

Biography

Rebecca Thomas is an instructor of English at West Virginia University, where she earned her MFA in fiction. Her writing has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in ZYZZYVA, Prairie Schooner, and The Massachusetts Review, among other places.

About ms. aligned 3

Launched in 2016, the Ms. Aligned series takes a literary approach to the male mystery, publishing women who write from the point-of-view of men or create strong male characters. To date, there have been two editions: two hundred sixty pages representing the work of thirty-six contributors.

Ms. Aligned 3 features the work of twenty women, edited by Rebecca Thomas, a writer and faculty member at West Virginia University. The collection features women’s writing focused on the male childhood: stories about boys on the difficult journey to adulthood; poems about being in love, being separated from family, or behaving in harmful, toxic ways; essays that describe the push-pull in male-female relationships and how we start influencing each other from a young age.

Critical Praise

"Ms. Aligned 3 is a collection about looking and seeing and the attempt to understand how the adult world functions and how innocence is lost. This collection makes a critical contribution to the conversation about masculinity as it forces readers, by transporting us back to childhood, to confront how we have all been complicit or conditioned into the roles that uphold the society we live in. This volume of Ms. Aligned offers just the right words for our times."
—Shawna Yang Ryan, author of Green Island and recipient of the American Book Award