About the Contributors

Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards have worked together on various projects since they met as 22-year-olds at Ms. magazine. In October 2000, a book they co-wrote about the state of the women's movement, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future, was published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. That book served as the platform for a national speaking tour that brought the two authors to literally dozens of community groups, countless bookstores, and some 150 universities and high schools. Joint writings by Baumgardner and Richards can be found in The Nation and several anthologies, including Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century. They have just completed a new book about everyday activism, Grassroots: A Field Guide to Feminist Activism.

Laura Coats is a graduate student at the University of West Florida. She is a founding board member of the Escambia Sociology Center, formed after the eradication of the sociology department by the University of West Florida.

Rory Dicker is senior lecturer in women's studies and English at Vanderbilt University. Along with her colleague Alison Piepmeier, she co-edited Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century (Northeastern University Press). She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.

Ayun Halliday is the sole staff member of the quarterly zine The East Village Inky and the author of The Big Rumpus: A Mother's Tale from the Trenches and No Touch Monkey! And Other Travelers' Lessons Learned Too Late. She is BUST magazine's Mother Superior columnist and also contributes to National Public Radio, Hipmama, and more anthologies than you can shake a stick at without dangling a participle. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she's hard at work on her next book, Job Hopper. You can read more about Halliday and her work on her Web site www.ayunhalliday.com.

Heather Hewett, a writer and scholar, has work published or forthcoming in Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, The Women's Review of Books, and Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers. She is a regular contributor of reviews and articles to The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Christian Science Monitor. Currently she is at work on a collection of creative nonfiction essays exploring disability and able-bodiedness. She received her PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2001.

Anastasia Higginbotham is a freelance writer who works from her home in Brooklyn, New York. She writes primarily for nonprofit organizations that promote social and economic justice and equality, and teaches full-impact self defense through the company Prepare, Inc. Her articles have appeared in magazines such as Glamour, The Women's Review of Books, Nerve.com, and Ms., and in the anthologies 33 Things Every Girl Should Know about Women's History (Random House, 2002) and Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation (Seal Press, 1995).

Lisa Johnson is the editor and a contributing author of Jane Sexes It Up: True Confessions of Feminist Desire, a collection of essays on third-wave feminism and the politics of sexuality. She teaches English and cultural studies at Coastal Carolina University.

Alison Piepmeier is assistant director of the women's studies program at Vanderbilt University. She is co-editor, with Rory Dicker, of Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century (Northeastern University Press, 2003) and is the author of the forthcoming book Out in Public: Configurations of Women's Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press). She is currently in the beginning stages of a project that will consider the role that cynicism plays in the third wave of feminism. She also happens to be a big fan of several of the other authors featured in this issue of the Scholar and Feminist Online.

Vanessa Raney is an M.A. student at Claremont Graduate University. She is interested in a Ph.D. program that 1) offers a joint/dual degree in Anthropology and History and 2) provides funding to conduct primary research in Africa, Australia and England.

Deborah Siegel, Ph.D. is the Director of Special Projects at the National Council for Research on Women and a freelance writer. Over the past decade, she has written about women, girls, and popular culture in venues ranging from popular anthologies and academic journals to magazines including Psychology Today and The Progressive. Prior to joining the Council, Deborah was a Research Scholar at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, where she oversaw the launch of the first online-only, refereed women's studies journal, The Scholar & Feminist Online. She is currently working on a book on changing images of feminism in popular American culture over the past 40 years.

Jessica Valenti is Communications Associate for the Women's Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) and Executive Editor of www.feministing.com, a website for young feminists. She received her MA in Women's and Gender Studies from Rutgers University, where her research concentrated on the politics of promiscuity. Jessica has worked with organizations such as Legal Momentum (formerly NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund), Planned Parenthood, Ms. magazine, and is currently a volunteer emergency room advocate with Mount Sinai Hospital's Sexual Assault and Violence Intervention Program.