Extraordinary Gifts celebrates 20 remarkable women with Philadelphia connections - including Louisa May Alcott, Margaret Mead, Mary Cassatt, and Marian Anderson - with original art, poetry, and fiction by contemporary artists and writers from the Philadelphia area. Each of the women this volume honors, some familiar and some less well known, have changed the world through their courage to think outside the box, to go against convention, and to defy society's expectations for their gender. The stories of these women span over two centuries of local and global history.