Updates and News

You may now download Ninth Street Notebook—Voice of a Nurse in the City by Veneta Masson in its entirety as a PDF to read online or print at no cost. Please see links below.

While copies of the book are still available at sites like Amazon.com, this collection of short first-person pieces about issues in health care, written while Veneta was working as nurse and director of a small inner-city clinic in Washington, D.C., has sold out and won’t be reprinted. The content, however, is still pertinent.

Named a "Book of the Year" by the American Journal of Nursing, it is still required reading in a number of courses for nurses and other health professionals. It has also found a readership among other groups, from caregivers to humanists. You can find an annotation on the NYU Literature, Arts and Medicine Database.

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About Sage Femme Press

Sage-femme is a term I first heard in Tunisia during the 1970s when I worked in international health. It translates from French to English as wise woman but is commonly used to refer to a traditional midwife. This double meaning has always appealed to me.

Sage Femme Press began in 1999 as a personal endeavor—a way to share my explorations of healing art as nurse, poet and essayist with readers both inside and outside the health professions.

It’s my hope that, one day, this small press will also serve as midwife to other artists and writers whose work feeds the soul.

– Veneta Masson

Watch the VidLit of Veneta's poem, "Arithmetic of Nurses."