" How Women Became Poets delivers a bold new perspective, showcasing with meticulous care and sensitivity how women poets exercised their authorship and claimed their position in a male canon. From Sappho to Hellenistic female poets, Delphic oracles, and epigrams, Hauser traces with remarkable rigor the genesis and making of the gendered poet. Female poets had to make a case for their own existence in antiquity and did so with subtlety and brilliance. This book makes us rethink our assumptions about ancient poets by probing the process of masculinization in the ancient poetic world." --Andromache Karanika, author of Voices at Work: Women, Performance, and Labor in Ancient Greece "This is a bold, ambitious, and original book: a new literary history of ancient Greece that challenges the model of male authorship by examining the implicit 'strategies of masculinization' that silenced and appropriated female voices."-- Laura K. McClure, editor of Sexuality and Gender in the Classical World "A subtle and elegant argument for reconceptualizing the idea of a tradition of 'women's' poetry, which is something of a tour de force given the vanishingly small amount of evidence on which it is necessarily based."-- Ruby Blondell, author of Helen of Troy in Hollywood "In exploring the equal claims of men and women to be recognized as poets and writers in ancient Greece, Hauser brilliantly illuminates the crucial role of gender in our reading of literary texts, and our understanding of their social contexts, both then and since.

"-- Judith Peller Hallett, coauthor of Ancient Women Writers of Greece and Rome.