PMS poemmemoirstory is a 140-page, perfect-bound, all-women’s literary journal published annually by the University of Alabama at Birmingham. While we proudly publish the best work of the best women writers in the nation (i.e., Maxine Chernoff, Elaine Equi, Amy Gerstler, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Molly Peacock, Lucia Perillo, Sonia Sanchez, Ruth Stone, and Natasha Trethewey, among others) we also solicit a memoir for each issue written by a woman who may not be a writer, but who has experienced something of historic significance. Emily Lyons, the nurse who survived the 1998 New Woman All Women Birmingham clinic bombing by Eric Rudolph, wrote the first of these; women who experienced the World Trade Center on September 11th, the Civil Rights Movement in Birmingham, the war in Iraq, and Hurricane Katrina have also lent us their stories.