Libras are leaders, critics, and beauty-questers. Their symbol, the scale, has been constantly employed in both life and literature: weighing fantasy and fact, connection and calamity. They are ruled by romantic Venus and blown by all the winds of the world. They are Ursula K. Le Guin and bell hooks, Ta-Nehisi Coates and T.S. Eliot, Arthur Rimbaud and Anne Rice.
With curls as luxurious as their epic poetry, they were born in Ancient Rome in 70 BC. They were writing, in Virgil’s case, such masterworks as the Aeneid and Eclogues - balancing such forces as heaven and hell.
Since then, Libras have taken many shapes for many centuries: from Rumi in 1207 to Roxane Gay in 1974. They invented the modern novel, in the case of Miguel de Cervantes, and pageantry, in the case of Oscar Wilde. They have been both the mediator and the muse of the zodiac, writing some of their most powerful poetry as Amiri Baraka in 1960’s Harlem.
They can, as F. Scott Fitzgerald said best, “hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” They can move from Ho Chi Minh City to Hartford, Connecticut as refugees and, 30 years later, write a book as real and as aching as On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. They can hold both pen and gavel - strike any fleeting truth.
Sarah J. Bofenkamp is a reader, writer, and librarian living in Palouse, Washington.
F. Scott Fitzgerald - September 24, 1896
William Faulkner - September 25, 1897
Shel Silverstein - September 25, 1930
bell hooks - September 25, 1952
T.S. Eliot - September 26, 1888
Miguel de Cervantes - September 29, 1547
Elizabeth Gaskell - September 29, 1810
Rumi - September 30, 1207
Truman Capote - September 30, 1924
Ta-Nehisi Coates - September 30, 1975
Graham Greene - October 2, 1904
James Herriot - October 3, 1916
Gore Vidal - October 3, 1925
Anne Rice - October 4, 1941
LeRoi Jones - October 7, 1934
Sherman Alexie - October 7, 1966
Frank Herbert - October 8, 1920
R.L. Stine - October 8, 1943
Marie Kondo - October 9, 1984
Ann Petry - October 12, 1908
Arna Bontemps - October 13, 1902
Masaoka Shiki - October 14, 1867
Katherine Mansfield - October 14, 1888
E.E. Cummings - October 14, 1894
Hannah Arendt - October 14, 1906
Ocean Vuong - October 14, 1988
Virgil - October 15, 0070
Mikhail Lermontov - October 15, 1814
Mario Puzo - October 15, 1920
Italo Calvino - October 15, 1923
Roxane Gay - October 15, 1974
Oscar Wilde - October 16, 1854
Eugene O’Neill - October 16, 1888
Günter Grass - October 16, 1927
Nathanael West - October 17, 1903
Arthur Miller - October 17, 1915
Ntozake Shange - October 18, 1948
Arthur Rimbaud - October 20, 1854
Samuel Taylor Coleridge - October 21, 1772
Ursula K. Le Guin - October 21, 1929
Doris Lessing - October 22, 1919
Deepak Chopra - October 22, 1946
