As part of The Pixel Project’s Read For Pixels campaign, we interview authors and poets from genres as diverse as Science Fiction and Fantasy to Romance to Horror about why they support the movement to end violence against women and girls.
For Domestic Violence Awareness Month 2025, we present an interview with Read For Pixels poet Carol Edwards who contributed her original poem Cold Snap to our 1st charity poetry collection, UNDER HER EYE. Carol is a northern California native transplanted to southern Arizona. Her poetry has been published in myriad anthologies, print and online periodicals, and blogs. Her debut poetry collection, The World Eats Love, was released April 25, 2023 by The Ravens Quoth Press. Find out more about Carol at www.practicallypoetical.wordpress.com.
Inspired to support The Pixel Project’s anti-violence against women work? Make a donation to us today OR buy our 1st poetry collection, UNDER HER EYE, that is published in partnership with Black Spot Books. All donations and net proceeds from book sales go towards supporting our campaigns, programmes, and initiatives.
1. Why is ending violence against women important to you and why did you decide to support The Pixel Project by contributing your poem Cold Snap to UNDER HER EYE which is The Pixel Project’s first charity poetry collection published in partnership with Black Spot Books?
This is a very personal issue for me. I know of at least three generations in my family that have somehow suffered from domestic abuse, including violence; at least one woman of my family is a sexual assault victim; and I’ve heard other violence and abuse stories from women in my social circles.
No child should grow up watching their mother beaten. No mother should fear for her safety and her child’s safety. No wife or girlfriend or daughter or sister or aunt or niece should be afraid to sleep without locks on her bedroom door. No woman anywhere should feel that saying “no” will result in violent retaliation. No woman anywhere should have to think of her existence as a liability.
I wanted to be part of something that spotlights this horror when so many wish to minimise its presence and invalidate the truth of women’s experiences.
2. What do you think poets can do to help with the cultural change needed to stop violence against women and girls?
Poets have long been the heralds, the criers, the messengers calling out the horrors lived by victims, unearthing from dark places what many try to keep secret. But it’s not just poets. These are topics exposed and decried in film, plays, fiction and nonfiction books, essays, music, and art. If nothing else, we must keep calling back to it, keep pressing for change, keep evidencing the atrocities still being committed around the world and demand they be rectified. We must keep countering cultural messages that this is somehow an acceptable way to treat women and girls.
3. Any final thoughts about why everyone should support stopping violence against women?
It feels discouraging to have to convince people violence against women and girls should be stopped. It happens in every country across the world. Mutilation, beatings, molestation, rape, murder – will people only support stopping the violence when it’s they who have become the victims? This isn’t just about protection and justice in the present, which it is; it’s also about bettering our future and grieving the past. It’s about a world where every woman is free from fearing for her safety, for her life.
Listen to Carol read Cold Snap here: