Barren: An Exploration of the Journey to Parenthood invites readers to reconceive infertility as rich and fecund and as part of parcel of the process of reproduction, regardless of outcome. Writing in a range of genres, contributors draw on personal experience— heartbreaking, heart-opening, and everywhere in between—to analyze and theorize the common, yet underexamined, experience of infertility and to challenge the stigma and silencing that surround it. The vulnerability and candor of the contributors’ accounts, as well as the suggestions about how to acknowledge and support those who are experiencing infertility, will engage and serve practitioners of reproductive medicine as well as lay audiences who are themselves, or accompanying those, on the rocky road to parenthood.

- Katherine Mack, Professor of English, University of Colorado Colorado Springs

Barren is a powerful and necessary anthology of creative and personal writing on infertility, pregnancy loss, maternal regret, and unfulfilled desire. Structured around the themes of Resistance, Resilience, and Empowerment, the volume brings together voices that confront shared traumas and transform silence into collective healing and strength. Barren foregrounds lived experience and embodied knowledge as vital forms of resistance and epistemology. While deeply affective, the anthology also invites critical reflection, offering an essential intervention into feminist theory, reproductive justice, and maternal studies.A vital volume for anyone interested in feminist life writing, the politics of care and loss, and the emotional complexity of reproductive life.

- Dr Veronica Frigeni, Centre for Feminist Research - York University

Barren is not a story of absence. It is a testament to the fullness of experience and a collective act of feminist truth-telling that insists infertility is not a failure, but a fertile ground for empathy, insight, and transformation. It is a powerful anthology that reclaims the term and redefines fertility—not by outcomes, but by the emotional, physical, and spiritual labor of trying.

- Rachel O'Donnell, Associate Professor and Associate Academic Director
Susan B Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies

Barren brings together powerful, personal accounts of heartache by fertility warriors, people who often face dismissal and suffer in silence with unimaginable grief and overwhelm. These diverse narratives break the silence of what countless others face on their path toward or through parenthood, including my own. This collection of works is also poetic, crafted in an artful way that the emotions of each courageous and resilient author leap off the pages. Thank you to the storytellers for their bravery.

- Laura Spencer, MPP, ACC, Certified fertility coach, fertility warrior, and mom