Bios
The Feminist Wire celebrates a multiplicity of feminist expressions from a variety of writers that span genders, sexualities, professions, races, ethnicities, ages, and geographies.
Tamura A. Lomax
Tamura A. Lomax is the Assistant Chair and an Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. She teaches, writes, and researches in the following areas: American Religion, African American Religion, African American and Diaspora Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Black British and U.S. Black Cultural Studies. She is the author of several essays and is currently at work on two projects: An edited volume entitled Womanist/Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry’s Cultural Productions, co-authored with Rhon S. Manigault-Bryant and Carol B. Duncan, and her first single authored monograph, Womanist Thought, Black Feminism, and Black Cultural Production. She is co-founder, along with Hortense Spillers, of The Feminist Wire.
Monica J. Casper
- Monica J. Casper is Department Head and Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. She writes about gender, health, bodies, sexuality, motherhood, reproductive politics, trauma, and disability. She is author of the award-winning book The Making of the Unborn Patient: A Social Anatomy of Fetal Surgery, co-author of Missing Bodies: The Politics of Visibility, and co-editor of Corpus: An Interdisciplinary Reader on Bodies and Knowledge. She is currently researching the biopolitics of infant mortality and maternal-child health and is also editing a volume on critical trauma studies. With Lisa Jean Moore, she co-edits the NYU Press book series Biopolitics: Medicine, Technoscience, and Health in the 21st Century. Monica’s essays and stories have appeared in Trivia: Voices of Feminism, Slow Trains Literary Journal, Florida Review, Canyon Voices, American Sexuality Magazine, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Spilling Ink Review, The Linnet’s Wings, Vine Leaves, and Conscience. For more information, visit www.monicajcasper.com.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a queer black troublemaker, a black feminist love evangelist, a prayer poet priestess and has a PhD in English, African and African-American Studies, and Women and Gender Studies from Duke University. Alexis was the first scholar to research the Audre Lorde Papers at Spelman College, the June Jordan Papers at Harvard University, and the Lucille Clifton Papers at Emory University, and she is currently on tour with her interactive oracle project “The Lorde Concordance,” a series of ritual mobilizing the life and work of Audre Lorde as a dynamic sacred text. Alexis has also published widely on Caribbean Women’s Literature with a special interest in Dionne Brand. Her scholarly work is published in Obsidian, Symbiosis, Macomere, The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Literature, SIGNS, Feminist Collections, The Black Imagination, Mothering and Hip Hop Culture, The Business of Black Power and more. Alexis is the author of an acclaimed collection of poems 101 Things That Are Not True About the Most Famous Black Women Alive and poetic work published in Kweli, Vinyl, Backbone, Everyday Genius, Turning Wheel, UNFold, Makeshift and more. She has several books in progress including a book of poems, Good Hair Gone Forever, a scholarly monograph on diaspora and the maternal, and an educational resource called the School of Our Lorde. She is also the co-editor of a forthcoming edited collection on legacies of radical mothering called This Bridge Called My Baby. Alexis is the founder of Brilliance Remastered, a service to help visionary underrepresented graduate students stay connected to purpose, passion, and community, co-founder of the Mobile Homecoming Project, a national experiential archive amplifying generations of Black LGBTQ Brilliance, and the community school Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind. Alexis was named one of UTNE Reader’s 50 Visionaries Transforming the World in 2009, was awarded a Too Sexy for 501-C3 trophy in 2011, and is one of the Advocate’s top 40 under 40 features in 2012.
Heather Laine Talley
Heather Laine Talley is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Western Carolina University. Her teaching and research interests center on gender and sexuality, medicine, and the body. Her writings on topics as diverse as philanthropy, disability, and romance have been published in a range of edited volumes and academic journals. She is currently completing a book titled Saving Face: Disfigurement, Repair, and the Vital Politics of Appearance. As an engaged scholar, her analytic lens informs her activism with a range of community based organizations including Act like a Grrrl, a Nashville based organization which invites girls to share and transform their personal experiences through writing and the arts, and the Midatlantic Burn Camp. In her work with children and adolescents, she uses the sociological imagination as a tool for fortifying self image and building political efficacy. Currently, she lives in the South and works alongside LGBTQ efforts pursuing justice through state and federal policy and queer wellbeing through grassroots connections.
- Ulli K. Ryder
Ulli K. Ryder, Ph.D. is an award-winning educator, consultant, writer, editor and thinker. She facilitates discussions of gender, race, ethnicity, identity formation and media to foster diversity and create open dialogue. She has been a Visiting Scholar at Brown University since 2009. Dr. Ryder earned her Ph.D. in American Studies & Ethnicity from the University of Southern California. She also holds a Master of Professional Writing (USC), a Master of Afro-American Studies (UCLA), and BA from Simmons College in English and African American Studies.
Siviku Hutchinson
Sikivu Hutchinson is a senior intergroup specialist for the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission. She received a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University and has taught women’s studies, cultural studies, urban studies, and education at UCLA, the California Institute of the Arts, and Western Washington University. She is the author of Imagining Transit: Race, Gender, and Transportation Politics in Los Angeles, Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars, and the forthcoming Godless Americana: Race and Religious Rebels (Infidel Books, 2012). She is also the editor of blackfemlens.org, founder of the Black Skeptics and a senior fellow for the Institute for Humanist Studies.
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is from Harlem, New York. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming internationally in publications including Callaloo, American Fiction, Best New Writing, Crab Orchard Review, Bloom, Lumina, Amistad, The Minnesota Review, 2010 Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize Stories, Baobab: South African Journal of New Writing, American Visions and GLQ. She is the recipient of the James Baldwin Memorial Playwriting Award, the Charles Johnson Fiction Award, and scholarships, fellowships, and residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Yaddo Colony, the Hedgebrook Writers’ Retreat, the New York State Summer Writers’ Institute, the Center for Fiction, and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at Williams College, where she is currently Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow. Her research focuses on the relationships between narrative voice and identity difference in contemporary women’s literatures of the African Diaspora. Her short story collection, Blue Talk and Love, is forthcoming in 2012.
Darnell L. Moore
Darnell L. Moore is an educator, writer and activist. His social & political commentary, interviews and poetry have appeared in various media outlets including The Huffington Post, Ebony.com, TheRoot.com, Mondoweiss, NewBlackMan (In Exile), Lambda Literary, PrettyQueer.com, Arts & Understanding, Urban Cusp, Gawker, Mary: A Literary Quarterly, The Jersey Journal, Social Text: Emergences Blog, Uptown Social and the official blog of President Barack Obama. His scholarly articles, which investigate the intersections of queer subjectivities and race, and queer Black Christian thought, can be found in Black Theology: An International Journal, Theology & Sexuality, Trans-scripts: An Interdisciplinary Online Journal in the Humanities and Social Sciences at UC Irvine, Transforming Anthropologies, The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies, darkmatter: an international peer-review journal (forthcoming) and Harvard Journal of African American Policy (forthcoming). Darnell has served appointments as a visiting fellow at Yale Divinity School and a visiting scholar at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. He has also served as a Lecturer at Rutgers University and The City College of New York (CUNY). He is a board member of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at CUNY and The Tobago Center for Study and Practice of Indigenous Spirituality. He has given talks at various universities including Yale University, Birkbeck College at the University of London, Tufts University, University of Pennsylvania, New York University, City University of New York Graduate Center, Rutgers Law School, Rutgers University (New Brunswick and Newark), Carleton University (Ottawa, CA), Hunter College, Phillips Theological Seminary,Essex County College (Newark, NJ), Seton Hall University and The Kennedy School at Harvard University. He received a BA in Social and Behavioral Sciences (Seton Hall University), MA in Community and Clinical Counseling (Eastern University) and MA in Theological Studies/Christian Education (Princeton Theological Seminary).
C. Riley Snorton
C. Riley Snorton is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University. He earned a Ph.D. in Communication from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University in Pennsylvania. Snorton has received several fellowships including an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral fellowship at Pomona College and the Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation fellowship at Harvard University. He writes in the areas of transgender and queer theory, Africana studies, cultural studies, performance studies, and popular culture. Snorton has published book chapters in Homophiles, Critical Essays on Dave Chappelle, and Transgender Migrations:The Bodies, Borders, and Politics of Transition. His articles can be found in the International Journal of Communication, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society. He is currently completing his monograph, The Glass Closet: Black Sexuality and Panoptical Imagination (University of Minnesota Press).
Aimee Meredith Cox
Aimee Meredith Cox, PhD, is a cultural anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Performance and African and African American Studies at Fordham University. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan where she also held a postdoctoral fellowship with the Center for the Education of Women. Dr. Cox’s research and teaching interests include expressive culture and performance; urban youth culture; public anthropology; Black girlhood; and Black feminist theory. She is currently completing a book entitled, Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship.Shapeshifters is an ethnographic exploration of the performative strategies young black women in low-income urban communities use to access various forms of self-defined economic and social mobility. Dr. Cox is the current co-editor of Transforming Anthropology, the peer-reviewed journal of the national Association of Black Anthropologists. Dr. Cox is also a choreographer and dancer. She trained on scholarship with the Dance Theatre of Harlem, toured extensively as a professional dancer with the Alvin Ailey Repertory Ensemble/Ailey II, and is the founder and creative director of The BlackLight Project, a youth-led arts activist organization currently working in partnership with the Sadie Nash Leadership Project.
David J. Leonard
David J. Leonard is the author of Screens Fade to Black: Contemporary African American Cinema and co-editor of Criminalized and Commodified: New Racism and African Americans in Contemporary Sports (Rowman and Littlefield). He is the author of the just released After Artest: The NBA and the Assault on Blackness (SUNY Press) as well as several other works. Leonard is a regular contributor to NewBlackMan, layupline, The Feminist Wire, and Urban Cusp. He is frequent contributor to Ebony, Slam, and racialicious as well as a past contributor to Loop21, The Nation and The Starting Five. He blogs @No Tsuris. Follow him on Twitter @drdavidjleonard.
Catherine Morrisey
Catherine Morrisey obtained her MA in Social Justice and Human Rights from Arizona State University in 2012. She also has her BA in History and Political Science from the University of Northern Colorado. Catherine’s research interests include public education, mental health as it intersects with age and gender, children’s rights, and body politics. She has an affinity for writing, reading, good coffee, shelter animals, and her freakishly cute niece. Catherine lives in Denver with her three children (all of whom are actually pets). You may read more of Catherine’s work on her website, www.catherinemorrisey.com, or send her a funny tweet @CaMo0.
Omar Ricks Photo courtesy of Jun Kamata
Aishah Shahidah Simmons
- Aishah Shahidah Simmons is an an award-winning African-American feminist lesbian independent documentary filmmaker, television and radio producer, published writer, international lecturer, and activist based in Philadelphia, PA. She is presently an adjunct faculty member in the Women’s Studies and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) Studies programs at Temple University where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on the her/histories and contemporary realities of LGBTQ people in all of their diversity. In 1992, she founded AfroLez® Productions, an AfroLez®femcentric multimedia arts company committed to using the moving image, the written and spoken word to address those issues which have a negative impact on marginalized and disenfranchised people. An incest and rape survivor, her internationally acclaimed short videos Silence…Broken and In My Father’s House, which were produced in 1993 and 1996, explore the issues of race, gender, homophobia, rape, and misogyny. Simmons is also the producer, writer, and director of the Ford Foundation-funded, internationally acclaimed, award winning film NO! The Rape Documentary. NO! explores the international atrocity of heterosexual rape and other forms of sexual assault through the first person testimonies, scholarship, spirituality, activism and cultural work of African-Americans. Subtitled in Spanish, French, and Portuguese, NO! also explores how rape is used as a weapon of homophobia. Alice Walker, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Color Purple says, “If the Black community in the Americas and in the world would save itself it must complete the work this film [NO!] begins.” Aishah credits her 10-year practice of vipassana meditation as one of the non-negotiable tools that support her work on gender-based violence issues. Aishah’s writings on gender-based violence, queer identity, non-Christocentric spirituality, cinematic activism, and intersectionality are featured on blogs and in several anthologies and journals in the U.S. and internationally. She has screened her work, lectured extensively, taught classes, and facilitated workshops and dialogues at colleges and universities, rape crisis centers, juvenile correctional facilities, and government sponsored events throughout the United States, in Canada, Italy, South Africa, France, England, Croatia, Hungary, The Netherlands, Mexico, Kenya, Malaysia, and India. You can follow her on twitter at @AfroLez and connect with her on Facebook through her Cultural Worker page. Website: http://NOtheRapeDocumentary.org
Mariko Nagai
- Mariko Nagai is a graduate of New York University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program, where she was the Remarque Fellow in Poetry. Her stories, poems, and translations have appeared in Pushcart Prize, New Letters, Gettysburg Review, Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, 13th Moon, and other journals. She has received multiple Pushcart Prizes both in poetry and fiction (and was nominated two other times, with one poem chosen for inclusion in the Best of Pushcart Prize) as well as residency fellowships from Rockefeller Foundation – Bellagio Center, Yaddo, UNESCO-Ashberg Bursaries for the Arts, and Akademie Schloss Solitude. Histories of Bodies: Poems was the recipient of the 2005 James Saltman Poetry Award and published by Red Hen Press in 2007, and Georgic: Stories was awarded the 2009 G.S. Sharat Chandra Award. Georgic made the longlist for the Frank O’Connor International Story Award, the world’s largest short story prize. Mariko was nominated for 2011 Pushcart Prize for her story “Confession”, which first appeared in New Letters and won the silver medal in Short Fiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. Her work has been translated into Bulgarian, Dutch, French, German, and Vietnamese. Currently, she is an Associate Professor at Temple University in Tokyo, Japan.
Shubhra Sharma
Shubhra Sharma joined the Connecticut College faculty in 2010 as the Vandana Shiva Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies. At Connecticut College, Shubhra teaches courses on transnational women’s movements and feminist ethnography such as “Chutney-Popcorn: Bollywood, Globalization, and Social Reform,” and “Traveling as Feminist.” Before coming to Connecticut College, Shubhra served as Associate Director and Senior Lecturer in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards, including a research fellowship with the Global Feminisms Collaborative at Vanderbilt University. Shubhra’s first book, “Neoliberalization” as Betrayal: State, Feminism, and a Women’s Education Program in India, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2011. Here, she analyzes how feminism as expertise played an important role in translating the “woman condition” into the “woman question” for the purposes of governance (by national and transnational authorities); how feminism as expertise displayed a form of “disciplining politics” vis-à-vis women “who will not articulate their needs in political terms”; and how subjectivities constituted through a form of “disciplining politics” challenge such politics in discourse and practices of everyday life. Shubhra uses betrayal as an allegory of/ for such challenges and tells many stories of such betrayal in context (Chitrakoot and Delhi, India). Currently Shubhra is examining the shifting (or not) nature of imaginations about self, family, and nation amongst the Indian diaspora community in Canada, especially those who have migrated there from Dubai in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to understand what constitutes the linchpin of cultural identity building within this community in its transnational movement. Shubhra has also worked as a research anthropologist for a cutting-edge design firm based in Dallas, TX. She currently resides in New York City with her partner.
Kevin Allred
Kevin Allred is a singer/songwriter/teacher/activist. He is currently a Ph.D. Candidate at Rutgers University in Women’s and Gender Studies interested in the ways popular black female musicians manipulate their voices to create uniquely political sounds. His work brings together performance studies, critical race theory, queer theory, and sound studies. Beyoncé Knowles is a particular focus of this ongoing work. He is currently an adjunct professor at UMass Boston in Women’s Studies.
- He also owns and operates the independent record label, Gutter Folk Records, on which he has released 5 albums to date – most recently Brave (Songs: 2005-2012) and Distractions & Forgotten Songs, both released in January 2013. He has been politically active with national and local LGBTQ organizations over the past fifteen years working on issues of queer youth empowerment through music, and continues to tour nationally as a singer/songwriter. Check out www.kevinallredmusic.com for more info.
Bushra Rehman
Bushra Rehman is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer who was born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens. She co-edited the anthology Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism, a seminal work on US based women of color and feminism. Her writing has been featured on BBC Radio 4, WNYC and KPFA and in the New York Times, India Currents, Crab Orchard Review, Sepia Mutiny, Color Lines, and Mizna: Prose, Poetry and Art Exploring Arab America. Bushra’s work has also been included in the anthologies Indivisible: Contemporary South Asian American Poetry, Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion and Spirituality, Ladies and Gents: Public Toilets and Gender, And the World Changed: Contemporary Pakistani Women Writers, Stories of Illness and Healing: Women Write Their Bodies, and Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War, Faith and Sexuality. Her collection Bhangra Blowout and Other Stories is forthcoming from Upset Press. See www.bushrarehman.com.
Hakima Abbas
Hakima Abbas has been active in struggles for social justice around issues of self-determination, race, class, gender and sexuality for over fifteen years in Africa and her diaspora. Her professional work as a human rights defender, policy analyst and researcher has focused on Africa and the Middle East. Hakima is currently the Executive Director of Fahamu, a pan-African organization supporting the movement for social justice in Africa by generating knowledge to serve activism; creating learning for, by and across movements; amplifying Africa-centered voices, perspectives and solutions in policy and decision-making; and, creating platforms for analysis and debate. She is the editor and author of various publications on a range of issues–from aid and reparations to African LGBTI equality and aid to peacekeeping in North Africa–to the Diaspora in the African Union. Hakima holds a Bachelor of Sciences in Mathematics from Leeds University and a Masters in International Affairs from Columbia University.
Rosa-Linda Fregoso
Rosa-Linda Fregoso is an interdisciplinary scholar and writer. She is the author of six books and edited collections, and has published numerous essays in print and online journals and edited collections. Fregoso is currently a Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz and lives in Oakland California. Fregoso’s research and teaching reflect her interest in human rights, culture and feminism in the Américas. Her publications cover issues of human rights, feminicide, and gender violence, media and visual arts, race, cultural politics and aesthetics, in the Américas. Fregoso received an interdisciplinary PhD (1982-87) from the University of California, San Diego. A former Chair of the LALS department, she is also faculty affiliate of Film and Digital Media, Social Documentation, Feminist Studies, and History of Consciousness. She is a member of the Scientific Commission of the Observatorio Nacional de Violência e Género (Universidade Nova de Lisboa); an International Research Collaborator with the Red de Investigadoras por la Vida y Libertad de las Mujeres in Mexico and Central America. She is a co-principal investigator of the Interdisciplinary Initiative for Human Rights in the Américas. A native of Corpus Christi Texas, Fregoso earned a bachelor in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to working in academia, she was a radio and television journalist. From 1977-79, she produced and hosted “Telecorpus,” a daily television-news program, broadcast in South Texas. From 1979-1982, she produced and hosted the weekly radio program, “The Mexican American Experience” for the Longhorn Radio Network and KUT-FM (an NPR affiliate). The Mexican American Experience was the first nationally syndicated radio program on Chicano/a issues to air on public and commercial radio stations. Fregoso’s expertise in human rights, gender violence, and media informs her public service. She provides expert opinion in gender asylum cases and consultation on gender violence in Latin America, and serves as advisor for documentary and multi-media projects. For more, please visit www.rosalindafregoso.com.
Nicole Guidotti-Hernández
Nicole M. Guidotti-Hernández is Associate Professor of American Studies and the Associate Director of the Center for Mexican American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her doctorate degree from Cornell University in 2004 and her M.A. from Cornell University in 2000. She received her Bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1997. Professor Guidotti-Hernández research interests intersect with a number of fields and areas: Transnational Feminisms, Critical Race Studies, Chicana/o Studies, Latina/o Studies, Borderlands History, American Studies, Violence and Citizenship, and Indigeneity and Nationalisms. Her book titled Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries with Duke University Press is a feminist intervention into discourses of nationalism, mestizaje and victimization that characterize the historicization of violence along the border between 1851 and 1910. Her articles such as “Reading Violence, Making Chicana Subjectivities” appear in anthologies such as Techno/futuros: Genealogies, Power, Desire (2007), edited by Nancy Raquel Mirabal and Agustin Lao-Montes. She has also published in journals such as Women’s Studies International Forum, Social Text, The Latin Americanist, and Latino Studies, where her article “Dora the Explorer, Constructing “Latinidades” and the Politics of Global Citizenship” is one of the most downloaded articles in the history of the journal. She is also at work on two new projects. First, ¡Santa Lucia! Contemporary Chicana and Latina Cultural Reinterpretations of Saint Iconographies, examines kitschy and queered representations of Catholic saints in literary, self-help, visual and performative forms. These alternative saint iconographies provide a site for theorizing subjectivity as they reinterpret the deeply disturbing and often violent hagiographies of Catholic saints as queered or kitsch cultural allegories. Second, Red Devils and Railroads: Race, Gender and Capitalism in the Transnational Nineteenth Century Mexico Borderlands, tracks the development of the railroad and gendered relations at both the southern Mexico borderlands between Guatemala, Belize and Chiapas and the U.S./Mexico border to the north. The project examines how racialized masculinity, femininity, representations and performances of gender were some of the most contentious sites where power was enacted, negotiated, and redistributed. As a public intellectual, Dr. Guidotti-Hernández has written numerous articles for the feminist magazine Ms. covering such topics as immigration, reproductive rights, the Dream act and Dora the Explorer. She also sits on the national advisory council for the Ms. and is currently on the national advisory council for Freedom University in Athens, Georgia. Website : nicoleguidottihernandez.com.
Linda Martín Alcoff
- Linda Martín Alcoff teaches philosophy and women’s and gender studies at the City University of New York, both at Hunter College and the Graduate Center. She has written and edited several books, including Visible Identities: Race, Gender and the Self (Oxford University Press, 2006). For more info go to www.alcoff.com.
Dylan McCann
- Dylan McCann is a recent high school graduate and will attend Warren Wilson College in the fall of 2012 to pursue a degree in Creative Writing. For the past six years, she has been involved with an autobiographical writing program for teenage girls, Act Like a Grrrl, where she has transitioned from participant to co-leader. Dylan was awarded a gold medal for poetry from the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards in New York City and attended the prestigious Kenyon College Young Writers Workshop. She recently returned from living in Kenya for three months, where she taught life skills to teenage girls. She loves to write more than anything.
Mason Casper-Milam
Mason Casper-Milam is eleven years old. She enjoys reading, writing, art, and nature. A Scorpio, she has a pet fish named Aqua and loves to swim, and she also has a puppy named Beaumont. She likes to geocache while hiking with her family and is a voracious reader. She believes all people should be feminist.
Kiyan Williams
- Kiyan Williams is a Newark-bred scholar and activist. He is currently an undergraduate at Stanford University, where he majors in Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity with a focus in Identity, Diversity, and Aesthetics. His writings interrogate the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in popular culture.
Sophia Azeb
Sophia Azeb is an Egyptian-Palestinian anarcha-feminist teacher, writer, and organizer pursuing her PhD in American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Sophia’s scholarship explores the impact of border-crossing visual, literary, and aural cultural production on identity formation in Egypt, Palestine, and Algeria in the mid-twentieth century. She currently organizes with the Palestinian American Women’s Association of Southern California. Sophia is also a writer for the popular media blog collective, Africa Is A Country. You can follow her on twitter: @brownisthecolor.
Tanisha C. Ford
Tanisha C. Ford, Ph.D. is an award-winning writer, intellectual, and activist designing her own brand of “Haute Couture Intellectualism.” She is currently writing a book, Liberated Threads: Black Women and the Politics of Adornment. She is an Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Follow her on Twitter @SoulistaPhd.
Theresa Runstedtler
- Theresa Runstedtler is Assistant Professor of American Studies in the Department of Transnational Studies at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) and was recently a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner: Boxing in the Shadow of the Global Color Line (UC Press, 2012), a book that explores the first African American world heavyweight champion’s worldwide legacy as a black sporting hero and anticolonial icon in places as far-flung as Sydney, London, Cape Town, Manila, Paris, Havana, and Mexico City. She has published scholarly articles in the Radical History Review, the Journal of World History, Canadian Issues, and In the Game: Race, Identity, and Sports in the Twentieth Century. She also contributes to a number of blogs including Loop21, Racialicious, Good Men Project, NewBlackMan, and the Layup Line. Her research and teaching interests include the intersection of race, gender, and resistance in popular culture; black transnationalism and U.S. transnational/international history; imperialism and globalization; comparative ethnic studies; postcolonial studies; European race relations; and black Canada. Visit her blog at www.theresarunstedtler.com and follow her on twitter @klecticAcademik.
Tressie McMillan Cottom
- Tressie McMillan Cottom is a PhD candidate in the Sociology Department at Emory University. Broadly, Tressie is interested in organizations, education, labor and stratification. Currently, her research examines the implications of for-profit colleges being number one granter of bachelor’s degrees to African-Americans. She also studies the interaction effects of gender, poverty, and motherhood status in these enrollment patterns. Why do students choose for-profits and to what ends? Her public writing has been published in Inside HigherEd, Huffington Post, The Nation, Contexts, and The Feminist Magazine. She is a Public Voices Thought Leadership Fellow, a researcher with the Research Network on Racial and Ethnic Inequality at Duke University, and a former Engaged Research Fellow with Emory’s Office of University-Community Partnerships. She also continues to consult with national and international clients on education policy and organizational effectiveness.
TC Tolbert
TC Tolbert is a genderqueer, feminist poet and teacher committed to social justice. TC is Assistant Director of Casa Libre en la Solana, adjunct instructor at University of Arizona and Pima Community College, and wilderness instructor at Outward Bound. Co-editor, along with Tim Trace Peterson, of the forthcoming Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat Books, March 2013), TC has two chapbooks: spirare (Belladonna* 2012) and territories of folding (Kore Press 2011). His work won the Arizona Statewide Poetry Competition in 2010 and his first full-length collection, Gephyromania, is forthcoming from Ahsahta Press. TC recently curated a trans and queer issue of Evening Will Come for the Volta, and s/he is a regular curator for Trickhouse, an online cross-genre arts journal. S/he is the creator of Made for Flight, a youth empowerment project that utilizes creative writing and kite building to commemorate murdered transgender people and to dismantle homophobia and transphobia. Connect with him here.
Heidi R. Lewis
Heidi R. Lewis is Assistant Professor of Feminist & Gender Studies at Colorado College. Her teaching and research focus on feminism, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity (black culture especially), Critical Race Theory, Critical Whiteness Studies, Critical Media Studies, and popular culture. She has articles forthcoming in the Journal of Black Studies, the Journal of Pan African Studies, and a reader examining the influence of rapper Kanye West. She holds a Ph.D. (2011) in American Studies from Purdue University, as well as a Graduate Certificate in Women’s Studies.
Edward (Eddie) Ndopu
Born to a South African freedom fighter mother who fled from the Apartheid regime to Namibia under self-imposed exile,Edward (Eddie) Ndopu is a dis/abled queer femme afropolitan living in Ottawa, Ontario. Named by the Mail and Guardian Newspaper as one of their Top 200 Young South Africans, he is a social critic, anti-oppression practitioner, consultant, writer, and scholar.After graduating from the African Leadership Academy. Eddie won a scholarship to attend Carleton University in Canada where he is currently furthering his commitment to social justice advocacy. He is the founder of the Global Strategy for Inclusive Education and is known for his activism on the educational rights of children with disabilities in developing countries.Eddie is a regular on the international conference circuit. He has participated as a discussion leader at the World Youth Meeting in Italy, given a Master’s Tea at Yale University, and delivered a keynote address at the International Association of Special Education’s Twelfth Biennial Conference.An alumnus of the British Council’s Global Changemakers Programme, he has consulted for the World Economic Forum where he was commissioned to produce a white paper on the role of business in addressing youth employability and education.As an anti-oppression practitioner, Eddie’s work pertains to disability justice, queer subjectivities, trans embodiment, black consciousness, anti-colonial resistance, and afropolitanism in relation to epistemic violence and structural discrimination. He is currently the administrative coordinator of the GLBTQ Centre for Sexual and Gender Diversity at Carleton University. Eddie also serves on the board of Carleton University’s Institute of Research, Education, Accessibility, and Design (READ).
Andrea Plaid
Andrea Plaid is the associate editor of the award-winning race-and-pop-culture blog Racialicious. She is also an associate producer of the renowned web series Black Folk Don’t. Her work on race, gender, sex, and sexuality can be found in the following publications: On The Issues, Bitch, AlterNet, RH Reality Check, Penthouse, Corset Magazine, In These Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, New American Media, and the 2011 anthology Feminism for Real: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism, edited by Jessica (Yee) Danforth. She is also a recurring commentator at Huffington Post Live, and has appeared on GRITtv. She participated in Harvard’s Feminist Coming Out Day 2011 as a guest panelist, and is the proud owner of A. Magdalene’s Touch.
Harsha Walia
Harsha Walia is a South Asian activist and writer based in Vancouver (Indigenous Coast Salish Territories) in Canada. She has been active in anti-racist, migrant justice, Indigenous solidarity, feminist, anti-imperialist, and Palestine solidarity movements for over a decade, including with No One Is Illegal, South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy, Defenders of the Land, Women’s Memorial March Committee for Missing and Murdered Women, Olympics Resistance Network and more. She is formally trained in the law, is the co-creator of a short film, and is the author of the upcoming book Undoing Border Imperialism. Find her @HarshaWalia.
Monica Torres
Monica Torres is an English and American Studies major who concentrates in Latina/o Studies and is writing her way into a career. As a college senior committed to institutional diversity, most of her battles are fought on paper, online, and in committees. Currently, her thesis is exploring the commodification of Latinidad through experimental fiction. She loves food and feelings, and has written for Creative Loafing Tampa about both. You can find her @MoniFierce and her personal blog misterracoon.tumblr.com.
Brooke Elise Axtell
Brooke Elise Axtell is an award-winning singer, songwriter, poet and performing artist from Austin, Texas. She is the Founder of SHE:Survivor Healing + Empowerment, a healing community for survivors of rape, abuse and sex-trafficking. Brooke is a member of the Speaker’s Bureau for Rape, Abuse, Incest National Network (RAINN), the largest anti-sexual assault organization in the U.S. and recently joined The Truth Panel for The Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives to speak out on the issue of human trafficking. Her work as a writer and activist has been featured in many media outlets, including Forbes, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Psychology Today, The Washington Times and Fox News. Through her creative communications company, Persephone Media, she helps authors, thought-leaders and entrepreneurs transform their ideas into powerful writing.
