Acclaim

Alice Embree’s memoir is a gift of honesty, integrity, and humor. But it’s also the story of the civil rights movement, SDS, the Columbia uprising, Woodstock, underground newspapers, sit-ins, arrests, and more. Embree was there, but, as she writes, “with my voice on mute.” Breaking through the toxic sexism poisoning the movement, she found that voice, and since then there’s been no stopping her. This story of women’s liberation is personal and political. It sings with passion.        

—Robin Morgan, editor, Sisterhood is Powerful

Voice Lessons is a memoir of the tumultuous and extraordinary life of Alice Embree, a tireless worker for equality and social justice who found her true strength and voice in the women’s liberation movement. 

—Marge Piercy, novelist and poet

A beautifully written and provocative memoir that is deeply rooted in life and activism in Austin, Texas, Voice Lessons hits at many levels. It is simultaneously a story of gaining a voice, of personal reflection, of historical accounting, and of offering lessons about gaining voice in turbulent times today. 

—Laurie Beth Green, University of Texas at Austin

Alice Embree’s voice is unique, her story amazing. She was everywhere—Austin, New York, Chile, Arkansas, and the list goes on. This is a far better guide to the 1960s left and its ties to the present than you will find in many an historian’s overview. Embree tells the story from the inside out. You can believe her.

—Doug Rossinow, author of The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America

Alice Embree gives voice to the women who struggled to be heard and valued in the male-dominated activist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In an impressive blend of warm personal revelations and acute political analysis, she recounts how a shy, well-mannered child of the Eisenhower era evolved into an anti-racist, anti-war feminist who has been fighting for social justice for decades.

—Thomas Zigal, author of Many Rivers to Cross 

Far from a dry history, this highly readable memoir brings those heady years [of upheaval in the 60s and 70s] alive and at the same time paints a picture of the personal life of a woman activist and leader inspired by the Civil Rights Movement to begin what became for her a lifetime struggle for the voices of marginalized people to be heard.

—Sharon Shelton, The Rag Blog, August 26, 2021

Voice Lessons is a memoir, a work of art, as well as an historical document… I honestly believe that this memoir will become standard for all students, young and old, who read about social change in America.

—Richard Croxdale, People’s History in Texas blog, October 29, 2021

In her new memoir, Voice Lessons, Embree, BA ’82, MS ’87, shares her experiences as a lifelong activist—from growing up in a Jim Crow-era Austin and her time at UT to living in New York in the late 1960s, Woodstock, and her travels to Chile, Cuba, and Mexico.

—Sofia Sokolove, “Alice Embree, who Helped Integrate UT, Talks About a Transformational Time in U.S. History,” November 1, 2021, Alcalde: The Official Publication of the Texas Exes.

Many memoirs by authors radicalized in the sixties use the decade as the central ballast for their stories, but for Embree that time serves as a springboard first into women’s liberation and then more broadly into ‘intersectionality.’

—Adam Schragin, “How Alice Embree Became an Activist,” January 23, 2022, Red Fault, an Austin DSA publication. This review also appeared in Against The Current, No. 218, May/June 2022.

Alice Embree was the 2021 co-winner of the Liz Carpenter Award for Best Book on the History of Texas Women, given by the Texas State Historical Association.”

Alice Embree is among a group of almost 300 American authors who were announced at an “author reveal” event on September 7, 2022, by the Texas Book Festival. The authors were chosen to participate in the festival – considered one of the 10 most prestigious in the country — which will take place November 5-6, 2022 at and around the Texas Capitol building.