Among Cris Mazza’s many honors—starting with a 1984 PEN/Nelson Algren Award for her first novel, How to Leave a Country—is the dubious distinction of coining the term “chick-lit.” She and Jeffrey DeShell invented it for their 1995 anthology, Chick-Lit: Post-Feminist Fiction. A literary innovator and excavator of complex emotional terrain, Mazza later lamented that her […]