Claim OwnershipLiterary Aviatrix: The Power of Story - Women in Aviation
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© 2025 Literary Aviatrix: The Power of Story - Women in Aviation
Description
Join Liz Booker as she interviews authors whose books feature women in aviation from across genres, historical periods, and types of flying, and be inspired by the tenacity, adventure, and courage of our sisters in the air.
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Liz not only promotes books featuring women in aviation, but also provides the tools and information for other women to tell their stories. Check out Writers' Room interviews for in-depth discussions on writing, publishing, and book promotion.
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WAYPOINTS are 5-10 minute excerpts from her book interviews with 50+ authors
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AUTHORS NOTES are 5-10 minute excerpts from her Writers' Room interviews with authors and other experts in writing and publishing
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Liz is a retired Coast Guard helicopter pilot and writer, and host of the Aviatrix Book Club, Aviatrix Writers' Group, and Literary Aviatrix website where you'll find hundreds of books featuring women in aviation for all ages.
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Sign up for the Literary Aviatrix Newsletter to stay up to date on book news and book discussions and follow her on social media @LiteraryAviatrix.
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192 Episodes
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Send us a textIn the 1930’s, pioneering New Zealand pilot Jean Batten set multiple aviation records, including a speed record from London to Sydney, the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from East to West in 1935 (which, before reading this I routinely accredited to Beryl Markham), and first person to fly solo from London to New Zealand to prove how aviation could connect her homeland to the rest of the world. “Alone in the Sky” is an apt summation of this pilot’s jaw dropping accom...
Send us a textBefore the U.S. entered WWII, the British Royal Air Force sent prospective pilots to the U.S. for training because they didn’t have the capacity to train the numbers they needed for the fight, and America’s women pilots helped train them. New York Times and USA Today Best-Selling author Lorraine Heath explores this fascinating niche of our history in her novel The Girls of Flight City, the December 2024 Aviatrix Book Club discussion book. Lorraine was inspired by a story she rea...
Send us a textIn this interview with co-author Samantha Arrington Sliney, a USAF Judge Advocate General (JAG) and Women's Initiative Team (DAF WIT) member, we talk about the new picture book she co-authored with fellow DAF WIT member, USAF pilot Megan Biles, All the Things Our Mommy Can Do, and we dive deep into military aviation pregnancy policies. While the focus of our conversation is centered around military aviation, the questions of law and policy impacting women's careers, and the book...
Send us a textMary Jennings Hegar is the recipient of the Distinguished Flying Cross with Valor, the Purple Heart, and five Air Medals for her service as an Air National Guard HH-60 Pave Hawk Combat Search and Rescue Pilot on three deployments in Afghanistan and many domestic civil humanitarian missions. When her aircraft was shot down in Afghanistan, she sustained back injuries that prevented her continued service as a pilot. The existing Ground Combat Exclusion Policy that prohibited women ...
Send us a textIn this Aviatrix Classics conversation with Guest Hosts Dr. Jacque Boyd and Captain Jenny Beatty, we welcome guest Carole Hopson, author of A Pair of Wings, to discuss the remarkable accomplishments of pioneering aviatrix Bessie Coleman. Despite all of the odds against her, Bessie learned to fly and earned her license in France in 1921, then returned to Europe to learn aerobatics before drawing mixed-race audiences to watch her perform in the U.S. Carole learned about Bessi...
Send us a textDon’t be fooled by the sweet cover of this picture book by U.S. Army AH-64 Apache combat helicopter pilots, Laura Pangallo Fryar (author) and Morgan Samuels (illustrator). In this interview we geek out on helicopter flying, military careers, “delivering justice” for U.S. ground forces, active duty parenthood, and creative pursuits—and also about their inspiring picture book, Be Something Epic. Laura is a career Army Officer who went through ROTC and, by way of Korea, German...
Send us a textIn this conversation with Kitty Banner Seemann, we talk about her spectacular experiences flying as a bush and glacier pilot in Alaska in planes full of mountain climbers, hunters, and adventurers to remote locations in some of the most challenging flight conditions imaginable, all described in her book Wings of Her Dreams: Alaska Bush and Glacier Pilot Kitty Banner.Buy the book: https://literaryaviatrix.com/book/wings-of-her-dreams-alaska-bush-glacier-pilot-kitty-banner/Did you...
Send us a textIn this episode of Literary Aviatrix Classics with guest hosts Dr. Jacque Boyd and Capt. Jenny Beatty, we discuss The Fun of It: Random Records of My Own Flying and of Women in Aviation by Amelia Earhart. This book offers fascinating insights to where aviation was at the time the book was published and how Amelia and her contemporaries imagined aviation would impact the future. We also learn from AE’s own words about her pre-aviation life, her selection and participation in the ...
Send us a textIn this Literary Aviatrix Writers' Room interview with Lola Reid Allin, she talks about her writing journey including courses at Gotham Writers in NYC, overcoming the fear of sharing personal details, hybrid-publishing with She Writes Press, book launch promotion, and her lessons learned on the value of critique. 00:00 Book Release: 'Highway to the Sky'00:25 Finding Your Voice: The Journey of a Writer18:30 Facing your fears in memoir writing24:31 Hybrid Publishing with She ...
Send us a textIn this interview with Canadian pilot Lola Reid Allin, we talk about her new memoir, launching on September 17th, 2024. 00:00 Introduction and Book Launch01:17 Synopsis and Reading09:28 Lola's Aviation Career11:59 Transitioning Beyond Flying16:01 Inspiring Others: Why did you write the book?17:34 Challenges and Discrimination: Navigating a Male-Dominated Field32:18 Balancing Motherhood and a Flying Career39:55 Exploring the World: Lola's Adventures in Travel49:28 Supporting...
Send us a textIn this Picture Book Panel discussion, we hear from five recently published authors who navigated various routes to publication including traditional, hybrid, and self-publishing to get their stories into print. They very generously share those journeys with us here—everything from the decision about which route to go, to the editing process, how they found their illustrators, what their distribution looks like, the percentage return they receive on book sales, special military/...
Send us a textJoin guest hosts Jacque Boyd, Jenny Beatty, and me as we discuss this out-of-print treasure, Neta Snook Southern’s I Taught Amelia to Fly. Through Neta’s own aviation journey, we get a very special lens into the experiences of aspiring pilots in the U.S. as they pursued their dreams during and after WWI. Her childhood stories emphasize the importance of exposing our girls to science and mechanics as that exposure imbued her with the skills and confidence to not only hold her own...
Send us a textIn this interview with author and retired U.S. Coast Guard Captain Martha LaGuardia-Kotite, we talk about her career, which culminated in being recalled to active duty as the Commandant’s Press Secretary, then we get into her books - So Others May Live: Saving Lives, Defying Death; Changing the Rules of Engagement: Inspiring Stories of Courage and Leadership from Women in the Military; and My Name is Old Glory: A Celebration of the Star Spangled Banner. The first two books featu...
Send us a textIn this Literary Aviatrix Classics discussion with co-hosts Jacque Boyd and Jenny Beatty, we discuss Louise Thaden’s memoir, High, Wide, and Frightened, first published in 1938, two years after Thaden won the Bendix in its first co-ed year. This is a quintessential read for every pilot and avgeek, anyone who loves history, and anyone who wants a great story featuring a daring, inspiring woman who is also honest about her fears and mistakes. A beautifully written memoir, it...
Send us a textIn this Literary Aviatrix Writers’ Room interview with best-selling author Maggie Shipstead we get into the details of her author journey. Maggie is an inspiration for anyone who aspires to be a professional writer. In our conversation, she talks about how a writing course with Zadie Smith during her undergrad at Harvard cemented her path as a writer. She went on to earn an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, followed by a two-year creative writing Stegner Fellowship at Stanfor...
Send us a textIn this interview with author Maggie Shipstead, we discuss her best-selling novel Great Circle. In this sweeping saga, we follow fictional pilot Marion Graves from her feral childhood in Montana where she first encounters a barnstorming pilot team and decides that flying is her life's purpose. She flies as a bootlegger transporting liquor, the flies as a bush pilot in Alaska before joining the Air Transport Auxiliary to fly during the war. Post-war, she decides to fly around the...
Send us a textWelcome to the new ‘Literary Aviatrix Classics’ series, where I discuss books written by and about our aviatrix pioneers with my venerable co-hosts, Dr. Jacque Boyd and Captain Jenny Beatty. In this interview, we get to know Jacque and Jenny, and we announce the subject of our first ‘Classics’ discussion. Dr. Jacque Boyd is an educator and a general aviation pilot. She has a B.A. in Education, Psychology, and Special Education. In 1979 she was awarded the Amelia Earhart Me...
Send us a textIn this interview with inspiring pilot Polly Vacher, she talks about her memoir Wings Around the World: The Exhilarating Story of One Woman’s Epic Flight from the North Pole to Antarctica. She shares how she prepared for the trip, some of the obstacles that stood in her way and how she navigated them, the very difficult decision she was faced with in trying to achieve the goal she’d prepared for over two years to accomplish, and the highlights of meeting people all across the wo...
Send us a textIn this fun interview with mystery writer Edith Maxwell, publishing under the pen name 'Maddie Day', we talk about her historical mystery, A Case for the Ladies: A Dot and Amelia Mystery, which launched in March. In it, a young Amelia Earhart, who is living in Boston, taking flying lessons on the weekends, and working at an immigrant settlement house, helps solve the mystery of a series of murders involving immigrant women. Edith, who has published over 30 books, also shares her...
Send us a textIn this interview with Bloomberg space journalist and author Loren Grush, we talk about her childhood growing up around Johnson Space Center with two NASA Engineers and how that led her to unearth the stories of NASA's first women astronauts.Did you know you can support your local independent bookshop and me by shopping through my Bookshop.org affiliate links on my website? If a book is available on Bookshop.org, you'll find a link to it on the book page. By shopping through the...
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