"I would love for my younger fans to read What Will It Take to Make a Woman President? by Marianne Schnall. It's a collection of interviews and essays by great women, including Maya Angelou, Gloria Steinem, and Melissa Etheridge. They will inspire you to become a better leader"

"The first and only fan letter I wrote to an author (other than to Gloria Steinem) was to Wally Lamb. It started with, “How can a man have written this book?” I bathed in Wally Lamb’s creation of a flawed but fascinating heroine teen girl who morphs into a sometimes misled, powerful and flawed adult woman. Her life’s adventures and choices, both positive and positively horrid, still touch me on my third, fourth and fifth read of this novel. (I loved it so much I voiced the book on tape.)"

"I found out in my thirties that Barbara Kopple’s effort is considered one of the greatest documentaries ever made. At the time of its release, I only knew that she had all but recorded my own life as a union organizer—the cold breaking dawn of the picket line each morning, sniper shots fired by company thugs, all completely unseen by the mainstream media. I was in Detroit, Compton, Louisville—she was in Harlan. We both lived on scraps. I slept with a shotgun at my side, sang our strike songs until my voice was raw. The ’70s were the last great militant era of American labor, but back then, we were just amazed to be able to fight one more day. Kopple’s characters were my comrades across the hollow, so to speak—and these Brookside women weren’t beauty pageant winners, either. They were the toughest leaders I’ve ever known. The most charismatic feminist icon of those years for me wasn’t Gloria Steinem—it was Lois Scott, a Brookside strike leader, drawing out a .38 from under her blouse, concealed in her bra."