About the Contributors

Meena Alexander was born in Allahabad, India and divided her childhood between India and Sudan. Her poems have been widely translated and anthologized. She is the author of Raw Silk and Illiterate Heart, winner of a 2002 PEN Open Book Award. Her memoir Fault Lines, one of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 1993, appeared in a new edition in 2003, with a Coda entitled `Book of Childhood'. She is the author of Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience; two novels, Nampally Road and Manhattan Music; and editor of the forthcoming anthology Indian Love Poems. She is Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Dorothy Allison, southern novelist, activist, feminist, confirmed femme flirt, expatriate rebel, and born-again Californian, grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, the first child of a fifteen-year-old unwed mother who dropped out of the seventh grade to work as a waitress. Surviving child abuse and poverty, she won a National Merit Scholarship and attended Florida Presbyterian College, then later The New School in New York where she worked on a degree in Anthropology. Allison joined a Radical Feminist Collective in the early 1970s, and says that Feminism saved her life: "It was kind of a religion that almost made sense." In 1988, she published Trash, a collection of short stories that won two Lambda Literary Awards. Allison received mainstream recognition with her semi-autobiographical novel Bastard Out of Carolina, a finalist for the 1992 National Book Award. In 1998, Cavedeller became a national bestseller, an off-Broadway play adapted by Kate Moira Ryan for The New York Theater Workshop, and a movie featuring Krya Sedwick and Kevin Bacon. Dorothy Allison's small press books include Skin: Talking About Sex, Class and Literature, and two editions of poetry, both titled The Women Who Hate Me. A novel, She Who, is forthcoming from Riverhead.

Amrita Basu is Professor of Political Science and Women's and Gender Studies at Amherst College. Her primary research interests center around questions of women's activism, women and social movements, women and religious politics, post-colonial feminism, and women's human rights. Her books include Appropriating Gender: Women's Activism and Politicized Religion in South Asia (editor, with Patricia Jeffery), and Two Faces of Protest: Contrasting Codes of Women's Activism in India.

Alison Bernstein is Vice President of Knowledge, Creativity and Freedom at the Ford Foundation. She joined the foundation in 1982 as a program officer and later served as director of its Education and Culture Program and as vice president for its Education, Media, Arts and Culture Program. A former associate dean of faculty at Princeton University, Bernstein is the author or co-author of American Indians and World War II: Towards a New Era in Indian Affairs; The Impersonal Campus; and Melting Pots and Rainbow Nations: Conversations on Difference in the U.S. and South Africa. Bernstein has published various articles on such issues as transferring from community colleges to four-year institutions, access to higher education for women and minorities, diversity on campus, and the impact of women's studies. She graduated from Vassar College and received a Ph.D. and an M.A. in history from Columbia University.

Elizabeth Bernstein is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 2001. Her research and teaching focus upon the sociology of gender, sexuality, and the body; the sociology of law; and contemporary social theory. She is currently completing a book entitled Economies of Desire: Sexual Commerce and Post-Industrial Culture, based upon ethnographic and policy research conducted in five European and American cities. She is co-editor of the (just released!) volume from Routledge press, Regulating Sex: the Politics of Intimacy and Identity, which focuses upon the meaning of recent state interventions in three domains of erotic behavior: same-sex intimacies, migrant sex-work, and legal regimes designed to facilitate the protection of children. Her next project will explore the alliance between feminist, neoliberal, and evangelical Christian interests in the shaping of current U.S. policies against "trafficking in women."

Siobhan Brooks is an expert on women of color in the sex worker industry. No stranger to controversy, Brooks is a queer black feminist who helped organize the country's first and only workplace union of sex workers at The Lusty Lady, a well-known peep show in San Francisco's North Beach district. Brooks has gone on to interview sex workers across the country and has published several articles as a result. Her work has appeared in the anthology Whores and Other Feminists, Z Magazine, Feminism and Anti-Racism, and the University of California Hastings Law Journal. Brooks is also a board member of the Exotic Dancer's Alliance, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in sociology at The New School. She is working on a book of interviews with sex workers of color.

Leslie Calman is Senior Vice President of Legal Momentum (formerly NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund). For 35 years, Legal Momentum has been advancing the rights of women of girls by using the power of the law and creating innovative public policy. Today, she directs Legal Momentum's Family Initiative, which seeks to educate, engage and mobilize women and their families to support major public investment in quality childcare, preschool and afterschool. Based in Washington, DC, the Family Initiative builds alliances among women's groups and children's advocates, develops advocacy tools and educational materials, and works with Congressional and state-based allies. She joined Legal Momentum in 1998 as Executive Vice President in the New York office, supervising the daily operations of the organization and leading the annual planning effort. In 2000, she played a major part in organizing the national conference, To Promote the General Welfare: Ending Women's Poverty. For the previous seven years, Ms. Calman served as the Director of the Barnard College Center for Research on Women, where she produced wide-ranging cultural and political programming for a campus and community audience, including the annual The Scholar and the Feminist conference, and the annual Barnard Conference for Women Over 50. For a decade prior to that, she taught political science and women's studies at Barnard, developing a number of courses that linked the two disciplines. Her scholarly work is on social movements as engines of political change, and her signature course, Modern Political Movements, was one of Barnard's most popular. Ms. Calman received her doctorate in political science from Columbia University and has written two books on social movements in India: Toward Empowerment: Women and Movement Politics in India and Protest in Democratic India: Authority's Response to Challenge.

Tammy Rae Carland is an artist who works with both photography and experimental video. She is also an Associate Professor at the California College of the Arts. Her photographs have been published in the books The Passionate Camera; Queer Bodies of Desire and Lesbian Art in America and her writing has been published in A Girl's Guide to Taking Over the World. She has also published photographs and received reviews of her work in numerous national magazines and newspapers including The New York Times, Big, The Los Angeles Times, The Wire, Spin and The Village Voice. Her work has been exhibited and screened in galleries and museums internationally. She is also the co-founder and owner of Mr. Lady Records and Videos, an independent record label and video art distribution company dedicated to the production and distribution of queer and feminist culture.

Staceyann Chin is a fulltime artist. A resident of New York City and a Jamaican National, she has been an "out poet and political activist" since 1998. From the rousing cheers of the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe to one-woman shows Off- Broadway to poetry workshops in Denmark and London to co-writer and performer in the Tony nominated, Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, Chin credits the long list of "things she has done" to her grandmother's hard-working history and the pain of her mother's absence. Chin was the winner of the 1999 Chicago People of Color Slam; first runner- up in the 1999 Outright Poetry Slam; winner of the 1998 Lambda Poetry Slam; a finalist in the 1999 Nuyorican Grand Slam; winner of the 1998 and 2000 Slam This!; and winner of WORD: The First Slam for Television. She has also been featured by cable access programs in Brooklyn and Manhattan as well as many local radio stations including, WHCR and WBAI. The Joseph Pap Public Theatre has featured this young poet on more than one occasion, and Staceyann has enjoyed great success internationally, with much lauded performances in London, Denmark, Germany, and New York's own Central Park- Summer Stage. Summer 2003 brought a remarkably successful whirlwind tour of South Africa: Cape Town, Durban, Johannesburg and a quick visit to Soweto. October found her playing at dancer when she was asked to be the first poet commissioned to write and perform a piece with the prestigious Dance Africa Chicago.

Ann Cvetkovich is Full Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture and Victorian Sensationalism (Rutgers, 1992) and An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Culture (Duke, 2003). She guest edited, with Ann Pellegrini, issue 2.1 of The Scholar and Feminist Online, "Public Sentiments." She has also published articles relevant to her interest in public feelings in the journals Camera Obscura, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and GLQ, and in the edited collections Dancing Desires, Feminist Consequences, and Trauma at Home: After 9/11.

Leslie Feinberg, a transgender lesbian activist, is author of Stone Butch Blues, Transgender Warriors, and Trans liberation: Beyond pink or blue. Feinberg is a journalist and a Managing Editor of Workers World newspaper, on the steering committee of the Queer Caucus of the National Writer's Union/UAW, co-founder of Rainbow Flags for Mumia, and a national organizer for the International Action Center.

Rebecca Haimowitz receives her MFA this Fall from the Film Division at Columbia University's Graduate School of the Arts, where she also worked as a Screenwriting Instructor. Having begun her filmmaking career in writing and directing, Rebecca has since shifted focus to documentary films. She wrote, directed and edited "The Truth Is..." which rated amongst the top 50 in MoveOn.org's "Bush in 30 Seconds" ad campaign. She is currently co-directing a feature documentary entitled: "Getting Busy: Teens & Sex in America," on the debate over sex education and the affects of the current administration's pledge of over $140 million to abstinence-only programs. She is also directing a film about how cochlear implants allowed members of her family to hear again, after a lifetime of profound hearing impairment. Rebecca plans to continue pursuing film projects that advocate feminism, activism and social justice.

Amber Hollibaugh is a self-described lesbian sex radical, ex-hooker, incest survivor, gypsy child, poor-white-trash, high femme dyke. She is also an award-winning filmmaker, feminist, Left political organizer, public speaker, and journalist. My Dangerous Desires presents over twenty years of Hollibaugh's writing, an introduction written especially for this book, and five new essays including "A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home," "My Dangerous Desires," and "Sexuality, Labor, and the New Trade Unionism."

Janet Jakobsen is Director of the Center for Research on Women and Acting Chair of Women's Studies at Barnard College. She is the author of Working Alliances and the Politics of Difference: Diversity and Feminist Ethics (Indiana University Press, 1998), co-author (with Ann Pellegrini) of Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance (New York University Press, 2002), and co-editor (with Elizabeth A. Castelli) of Interventions: Activists and Academics Respond to Violence (Palgrave 2004) She is currently working on a book project, Sex, Secularism and Social Movements: The Value of Ethics in a Global Economy. Before entering the academy, she was a policy analyst, organizer, and lobbyist in Washington, D.C.

Temma Kaplan, activist, writer, and Professor of History at Rutgers University, was Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women from 1983 to 1991. A long time participant in civil rights, anti-war, and women's movements, she has written about grassroots movements of women in the U.S., Africa, Latin America, and Spain. Her most recent book, Taking Back the Streets: Women, Youth, and Direct Democracy (University of California Press, 2004) deals with women and young people shaming torturers and resisting authoritarian governments in Argentina, Chile, and Spain.

Surina Khan is a longtime progressive activist and writer. She has written extensively about right-wing movements, progressive movement building, sexual rights, immigration, and transnational organizing. Her research and writing have been published in many publications including AsianWeek, Trikone, The Boston Phoenix, The Gay and Lesbian Review, The Hartford Advocate, Boston Magazine, and Sojourner and her essays have been anthologized in several books. She is currently a consultant to a number of social justice organizations including the National Center for Human Rights Education, the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, Funders for Lesbian and Gay Issues, the South Asian Network, and the Funding Exchange, providing assistance in the areas of research and writing, organizational and project development, strategic planning, and fundraising. From 2000-2002 Surina served as the Executive Director of the International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission, and prior to that she was a research analyst with Political Research Associates, a think tank and research center that studies, analyzes and publishes on the political Right.

Jenny Kern received a J.D. degree from University of California Hastings College of the Law, San Francisco, in 1994. She practiced civil rights law with a focus on police misconduct cases in Oakland, California, 1994-96. From 1997 to 2000, Ms. Kern directed Whirlwind Women (WW), an international women's wheelchair-building project. Whirlwind Women's work focused on projects in Kampala, Uganda, Nairobi, Kenya and San Luis Potosi, Mexico. Since moving on from Whirlwind Women, she has worked on international disability rights projects as a consultant with Mobility International USA (MIUSA) and with Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF), leading disability rights trainings in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and San Jose, Costa Rica. In 2002 Jenny returned to graduate school to pursue an M.A. degree in East-West Psychology. Since August 2004, she spends most of her time in Berkeley CA with her new son Jasper Kern.

Elaine Kim is a professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the Acting Associate Dean of the Graduate Division. She is the former chair of the Comparative Ethnic Studies Department, former Faculty Assistant for the Status of Women, and former Assistant Dean of the College of Letters and Science at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Fresh Talk/Daring Gazes: Conversations on Asian American Art (with Margo Machida and Sharon Mizota), Invasian: Asian Sisters Represent, and Echoes Upon Echoes: New Korean American Writing (with Laura Hyun Kang).

Rachel Maddow co-hosts Air America Radio's "Unfiltered" with Chuck D. "Unfiltered" is heard across the country on Air America affiliate stations, on XM and Sirius satellite radio, and at airamericaradio.com. Rachel is a graduate of Stanford and Oxford Universities; she earned her doctorate in Politics as a Rhodes Scholar. A lifelong activist, Rachel has worked in the fields of HIV/AIDS and prison reform for many years, and worked with the ACLU National Prison Project to end discriminatory HIV/AIDS policies in Alabama and Mississippi state prisons. Rachel and her partner, artist Susan Mikula, live in West Cummington, Massachusetts, and in New York City.

Terry O'Neill is a feminist attorney, professor and activist, elected Membership Vice President of the National Organization for Women in June 2001. She has taught at a number of law schools, primarily at Tulane University School of Law, where she taught feminist legal theory and international women's rights law, in addition to corporate law and legal ethics. O'Neill's feminist activism began with fighting right-wing extremists in the Deep South. She has served as president of Louisiana NOW, president of the New Orleans chapter and has been a member of NOW's National Board and National Racial Diversity Committee. Using her background in law to fight important legal battles for feminists, O'Neill has written key amicus briefs at the federal, trial and appellate levels on abortion rights issues for Louisiana NOW, Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union. O'Neill's community activism includes work with labor unions, Louisiana's Lesbian and Gay Political Action Caucus, the Mayor of New Orleans' Task Force on Domestic Violence and ACORN of Louisiana. O'Neill is also a skilled political organizer, having worked on campaigns ranging from the election of Louisiana's first woman U.S. Senator, Mary Landrieu to the successful defeat of David Duke's bid for the Louisiana governorship. She also worked on successful campaigns to elect women's rights supporters to the Louisiana state legislature and to state judgeships. O'Neill has one child, a daughter who is a proud feminist.

Minnie Bruce Pratt has published five books of poetry, The Sound of One Fork, We Say We Love Each Other, Crime Against Nature, Walking Back Up Depot Street, and The Dirt She Ate: Selected and New Poems, recently issued by Pitt Poetry Series. She is also the author of Rebellion: Essays 1980-1991 and S/HE. She has received a Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and is the recipient of numerous awards including the American Library Association Gay and Lesbian Book Award for Literature, the Academy of American Poets' Lamont Poetry Selection, and the Fund for Free Expression's Lillian Hellman-Dashiell Hammett Award, which is given to writers "who have been victimized by political persecution."

Barbara Ransby is Associate Professor of History and African-American Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Ella Baker and the Black Radical Tradition, which has won numerous awards, including the American Historical Association's Joan Kelley Prize for best book in women's history, the Letita Woods Brown Memorial Prize for best book in African American women's history, and the Gustavas Myer Outstanding Book Award. She has also contributed chapters and articles to such volumes as Dispatches from the Ebony Tower: Intellectuals Confront the African-American Experience, Civil Rights Since 1787: A Reader on the Black Struggle, and The Bridge Over the Racial Divide: Rising Inequality and Coalition Politics.

Kumkum Sangari has taught English at Indraprastha College, University of Delhi, and is currently Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. She is the author of Politics of the Possible: Essays on Gender, History, Narratives, Colonial English (1999), and has edited Women and Culture, Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, and From Myth to History: Essays on Gender.

Heisoo Shin, trained as a sociologist, has been involved in the women's movement for thirty years in advancing women's rights in many areas but especially in the area of violence against women, nationally, regionally, and internationally. In 1991, she led the nationwide campaign to enact legislations on sexual violence and domestic violence as head of the Korea Women's Hot Line and Korea Women's Associations United. She also spearheaded to bring the issue of military sexual slavery by Japan, the so-called 'comfort women' issue, to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, resulting in two excellent reports on the issue by the Special Rapporteur on systemic rape, sexual slavery and slavery-like practices during wartime. She is a long-time member of the Asia Pacrific Forum on Women, Law and Development. Having decided to fully commit to activism, she resigned from her 7-year professorship at Hanil University and Theological Seminary in Jeonju, Korea, and now teaches as a visiting professor at Kyunghee University in Seoul. Since 2001, she has been a member of the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, a treat body to monitor the State Party's implementation of the CEDAW Convention.

Lateefah Simon's journey with The Center for Young Women's Development began in 1993 when she was a volunteer working on the 1-800-WHATEVA lines. She became a staff member in 1994 and in 1998, at age 19, she became Executive Director. Ms. Simon is a gifted speaker and dynamic leader. She has spoken at the United Nations, before the United States Senate, and at numerous conferences around the country. In 2003 she was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. She has also won awards from the Ford Foundation, the National Organization for Women and Oprah Magazine. She is currently a member of the Board of the Women's Foundation of California and the San Francisco Juvenile Detention Alternates Executive Committee. Lateefah Simon lives in San Francisco with her 8-year-old daughter Aminah.

Faye Wattleton is the president of the Center for the Advancement of Women, an independent, nonpartisan non-profit research and education institution dedicated to advocating for the advancement of women. From 1978 to 1992, as president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) Ms. Wattleton played an unsurpassed role in defining the national debate over reproductive rights and health, and in shaping family planning policies and programs around the world. As the youngest person and first woman named to the presidency of the nation's oldest and largest voluntary reproductive health organization, Ms. Wattleton's vision, leadership and courage projected Planned Parenthood into the forefront of the battle to preserve women's fundamental right to self-determination. Under her leadership, PPFA grew to become the nation's seventh largest charitable organization, providing medical and educational services to four million Americans each year, through 170 affiliates, operating in 49 states and the District of Columbia. Under Ms. Wattleton's guidance, PPFA also supported family planning programs in dozens of developing nations through its international division, Family Planning International Assistance. Her memoir, Life on the Line, was published, in the fall of 1996, by Ballantine Books.