MARGARET CHO
is one of the most prolific and critically acclaimed comedians of our time. Born and raised in San Francisco, she made her stand-up debut at the age of sixteen and eventually landed her own sitcom,
All American Girl
. After struggling with the network over her ethnicity and weight, the show was cancelled after one season; an experience she chronicled in her off-Broadway show,
I’m The One That I Want
. Five tours later, and Cho, hailed by the
New York Times
as “Murderously Funny,” has been nominated for a Grammy and received accolades from NOW, PFLAG, and the ACLU. Visit her online at
www.MargaretCho.com
.
HEATHER CORINNA
lives and works as a sexuality and women’s activist, educator, and rabble-rouser in Seattle. She is founder and director of
Scarleteen.com
, the popular young-adult sex education clearinghouse established in 1998; is a frequent commentator and consultant on young adult and women’s sexuality issues; and acts as a birth control and abortion counselor for the Feminist Women’s Health Center. Her art and written work have been broadly published, including in
Aqua Erotica; Shameless: Women’s Intimate Erotica; The Adventures of Food; The Mammoth Book of Erotic Women, PIF
magazine,
Viscera, Issues
magazine,
On Our Backs, Maxi
magazine, and the forthcoming
Breakthrough Bleeding: Essays on the Thing Women Spend a Quarter of Their Time Doing, but No One’s Supposed to Talk About.
She is also the author of the young-adult sexuality guide
S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-to-Know Progressive Sexuality Guide to Get You Through High School and College
(Da Capo, 2007). She frequently dreams yet rarely sleeps.
JILL FILIPOVIC
is a New York-based attorney and writer. She is the executive editor of Feministe (
http://feministe.us
) and the reproductive justice and gender editor at AlterNet (
www.alternet.org
). Jill also blogs at the Huffington Post and Ms. JD. She holds a BA and a JD from New York University.
STACEY MAY FOWLES
is a writer whose work has been published in various online and print magazines, including
Kiss Machine, Girlistic,
the Absinthe Literary Review,
Hive,
and
sub-TERRAIN.
She has received multiple writing grants from the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Canadian Council for the Arts. She has performed at TSPBF, Ladyfest, and Word on the Street, and has forthcoming work in multiple anthologies, including
TOK3
(from Toronto’s Diaspora Dialogues) and
Boredom Fighters
(from Tightrope Books). Fowles’s nonfiction writing has been anthologized in the widely acclaimed
Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity
(Seal Press) and
First Person Queer
(Arsenal Pulp Press). She currently is the publisher of and blogs daily for
Shameless
magazine, an online and print feminist magazine for teenage girls “who get it.” The Shameless blog was recently voted the Best Canadian Feminist Blog by the F-word blog awards. Fowles’s first novel,
Be Good,
was published by Tightrope Books in November 2007. She is currently working on a graphic novel with illustrator Marlena Zuber, which will be published in fall 2008 by Invisible Publishing.
JACLYN FRIEDMAN is a queer Jewish writer, performer, and activist. In her work as the program director for the Center for New Words, she produces fifty-plus events per year, including author discussions, writing workshops, open mics, political discussions, music concerts, book groups, and special events. She is cofounder and cochair of WAM!, CNW’s conference on Women, Action & the Media. Friedman’s work has been published in many outlets, including
Bitch,
AlterNet, Women’s eNews, and
PW.org
. She performs and agitates with Big Moves, a national size-diverse dance and performance troupe. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College.
COCO FUSCO
, a New York-based interdisciplinary artist and writer, has performed, lectured, exhibited, and curated around the world since 1988. She is an associate professor at Columbia University; the author of
English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas
and
The Bodies That Were Not Ours: And Other Writings;
and the editor of
Corpus Delecti: Performance Art of the Americas
and
Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self
(with Brian Wallis). Her work on military interrogation was selected for the 2008 Whitney Biennial.
In 2007,
KATE HARDING
founded Shapely Prose (
www.kateharding.net
), which quickly became the most widely read fat-acceptance blog on the web. She’s currently at work on a book about body image with fellow blogger Marianne Kirby, to be published by Perigee Books in spring 2009; in the meantime, her writing can be found in Harriet Brown’s anthology
Feed Me!
and at the award-winning group blog Shakesville, as well as at Shapely Prose. She lives in Chicago.
JAVACIA N. HARRIS
was born and bred in Birmingham, Alabama, but she spent years in California’s East Bay. This means she likes palm trees and sweet tea and often uses the words “y’all” and “dude” in the same sentence. Javacia is a full-time professional journalist and a hard-working essayist and blogger. Her work has appeared in news and leisure publications in cities across the country, including Louisville, Seattle, and Berkeley. Nonetheless, her expensive master’s degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, has yet to pay for itself. Javacia has a thing for candy corn, cupcakes, and spiral notebooks. She likes to dance with herself and she’s madly in love with God, her husband, and Facebook. She really wanted this bio to make her sound cool, but in case it didn’t, get to know her better at
http://javaciaharris.blogspot.com
.
ANASTASIA HIGGINBOTHAM
is an artist and mother who moonlights as a self-defense instructor. She earns her living drafting speeches and content for the annual galas of social justice organizations. She lives with her partner and their son in Brooklyn.
TILOMA JAYASINGHE, JD
, is National Advocates for Pregnant Women’s Baron Edmond de Rothschild Staff Attorney Fellow. As a special fellow, Jayasinghe focuses her legal, educational, and organizational skills on the intersection of the war on reproductive rights and the war on drugs. She is a graduate of NYU and the George Washington University School of Law. An experienced litigator, Jayasinghe has a diverse legal background that includes litigating bankruptcy and financial restructuring cases, filing habeas corpus appeals, and preparing VAWA (Violence Against Women Act) self-petitions and battered-spouse waivers. As an associate at the international law firm Mayer, Brown, Rowe and Maw, LLP, she spearheaded a pro bono project supporting the development and creation of the Asian University for Women. Jayasinghe has also worked as a volunteer attorney for Dwa Fanm, a women’s advocacy organization committed to eradicating all forms of discrimination, injustice, and violence against Haitian women and girls.
LISA JERVIS
is the founding editor and publisher of
Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture,
a national nonprofit quarterly magazine offering feminist commentary on our intensely mediated world. She is also a founding board member of the media training and advocacy organization Women in Media & News. Her work has appeared in numerous magazines and books, including
Ms.,
the
San Francisco Chronicle, Utne Reader, Mother Jones,
the
Women’s Review of Books, BUST, Hues, Salon, Girlfriends, Punk Planet, Body Outlaws
(Seal Press
), LiP: Informed Revolt,
and
The BUST Guide to the New Girl Order
(Penguin
).
She is the coeditor of
Young Wives’ Tales: New Adventures in Love and Partnership
(Seal Press) and
BITCHfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of
Bitch
Magazine
. She’s currently working on a cookbook tentatively titled
Cook Food: A Quick and Dirty Guide to Healthy Eating,
and a book about the intellectual legacy of gender essentialism and its effect on contemporary feminism. She speaks widely on feminism, media criticism, and the independent press.
CARA KULWICKI
is a freelance writer and feminist blogger. She is the founder and executive editor of The Curvature (
http://thecurvature.com
) and a contributor to Feministe (
http://feministe.us
). When not writing, Cara works part-time for Planned Parenthood in the Rochester/Syracuse region (for which she does a lot of writing). She holds a bachelor’s degree in English, text, and writing from the University of Western Sydney.
SUSAN LOPEZ
was a stripper for fifteen years, in thirty-nine cities around the world. During her travels, she made it a point to visit and speak with sex workers in the red-light areas in every country she could. She received her BA from UC Berkeley in peace and conflict studies, and her MSc in social policy and development from London School of Economics. She is cofounder and assistant director of Desiree Alliance, and founder and director of the Sin City Alternative Professionals’ Association in Las Vegas.
THOMAS MACAULAY MILLAR
is the pen name of a New York-area litigator active for several years in online communities, including
Feministing.com
. In real life he is a spouse, a parent, a voter, and a Scottish American, not necessarily in that order.
SAMHITA MUKHOPADHYAY
is a thirty-year-old writer, organizer, and geek living in San Francisco. She is the training and technology coordinator at the Center for Media Justice, a grassroots non-profit that defends the communications rights of disenfranchised communities. She has been a writer at
Feministing.com
for three years, and her work has appeared in
The Nation, The American Prospect,
WireTap magazine,
ColorLines,
and
Bitch.
She has a BA in women’s studies and sociology from SUNY Albany and an MA in women’s studies from San Francisco State University.
MARIKO PASSION
is a performance artist/activist/educator/whore revolutionary. She sings and rhymes her experiences and reality over beats, produces and edits documentary videos, and educates the community across the United States and internationally on issues related to sex worker’s rights. She is also an accomplished visual artist, most recently participating in a groundbreaking show on sex workers of Asian descent in San Francisco, entitled
We, Asian Sex Workers.
She panels at conferences in the United States and internationally, and has been published in $pread and the
San Francisco Examiner
and interviewed on KPFA, Shake Radio, and Radio Suzy 1. She is available to create a workshop, presentation, or performance for groups. She is currently a sex worker in Los Angeles under a different name and running the L.A. chapter of Sex Workers Outreach Project Los Angeles (SWOP-LA).
MIRIAM ZOILA PÉREZ
is a writer, blogger, and senior advocacy associate at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health. A graduate of Swarthmore College, Miriam has been working in the reproductive justice movement for the past two years, both online and off. She is a trained doula and is the sole blogger and founder of
Radicaldoula.com
. She also blogs at
Feministing.com
, and her writing has appeared in
Bitch, The Nation,
RH Reality Check, and CampusProgress. Miriam is a queer Latina and currently lives in Washington, D.C.
BRAD PERRY
worked for several years as the male outreach coordinator at James Madison University’s Office of Sexual Assault Prevention before coming to the Virginia Sexual and Domestic Violence Action Alliance in 2000. In the position of sexual violence prevention coordinator, he provides training and technical assistance to local sexual violence-prevention initiatives throughout Virginia. Since 2004, Brad has consulted with the Division of Violence Prevention at the Centers for Disease Control to improve its national Rape Prevention and Education grant system. Brad is also the editor of the “Moving Upstream” newsletter, and has co-authored articles for
The Prevention Researcher, Violence Against Women
(Sage Publications), and XYonline. In his spare time, Brad plays drums in a touring indie-rock band and spends time with friends in beautiful downtown Charlottesville, Virginia.
LATOYA PETERSON
is a hip-hop feminist and the editor of the blog Racialicious, which discusses the intersection of race and pop culture.
LEAH LAKSHMI PIEPZNA-SAMARASINHA
is a queer high-femme Sri Lankan writer, spoken-word artist, arts educator, and cultural worker. The author of
Consensual Genocide
(TSAR), she has performed her work widely across North America, including at WOW Theatre, Swarthmore College, Oberlin College, Sarah Lawrence, Bar 13, Gendercrash, the Loft, RADAR Reading Series, and Buddies in Bad Times Theatre. Her writing on young feminists and queers of color and survivor issues is widely anthologized, including in
Homelands: Women’s Journeys Across Race, Place, and Time; We Don’t Need Another Wave; BitchFest; Colonize This!; With a Rough Tongue: Femmes Write Porn; Without a Net; Dangerous Families; Brazen Femme;
and
A Girl’s Guide to Taking Over the World.
She is the cofounder and co-artistic director of Mangos With Chili, an annual touring cabaret of queer and trans people of color performance artists. Leah has taught writing for seven years to queer, trans, and two-spirit youth, and as the cofounder of the Asian Arts Freedom School, Toronto’s only writing and radical history program for APIA youth. She is currently working on her second book,
Dirty River,
a memoir of coming of age as a punk, queer, brown survivor in the late ’90s; touring her first one-woman show,
Grown Woman Show;
and completing
The Revolution Starts at Home,
a zine about partner abuse in activist communities. In her spare time, she’s an MFA candidate at Mills College. Her website is
www.brownstargirl.com
.