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Maggie Mertens with Elise Hooper
Local journalist Maggie Mertens celebrates the launch of her first book. Better, Faster, Farther: How Running Changed Everything We Know About Women is the story of how women runners have changed how we define gender through physical capability. Elise Hooper, local author of Fast Girls, a novel based on the real life history of the first integrated women’s Olympic team, will join Maggie in onstage conversation.
Better, Faster, Farther is the story of how women runners have changed what we think and know about gender one stride at a time. While many may know that women used to be discouraged from running because “their uteruses would fall out,” this book details exactly how inaccurate ideas about women’s bodies and physical capabilities, peddled for centuries, have held women back from equality. From rules that limited how far women could run, what records were kept, and which kind of women were allowed to train, the story of women running sheds new light onto the larger story of gender inequality in realms from medicine, schooling, the workplace, science, and sports that continue today.
Maggie Mertens is a journalist who covers gender, culture, and sports. Her essays and reporting have appeared in The Atlantic, Sports Illustrated, espnW, VICE, Glamour, The Guardian, Refinery29, and Creative Nonfiction, among others. Her work has also appeared in The Year’s Best Sports Writing 2021, and Women and Sports in the United States. She is a graduate of Smith College and The New School. She lives in Seattle with her husband and two children.
A native New Englander, Elise Hooper spent several years writing for television and online news outlets before getting a MA and teaching high-school literature and history. Her debut novel The Other Alcott was a nominee for the 2017 Washington Book Award. Three more novels—Learning to See, Fast Girls, and Angels of the Pacific—followed, all centered on the lives of extraordinary but overlooked historical women. Elise now lives in Seattle with her husband and two teenage daughters and her next book, The Library of Lost Dollhouses, will be released in April 2025.
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Website: https://go.evvnt.com/2483832-0
