Contributors
Julia Balén has a Ph.D. in Comparative Cultural and Literary Studies with a focus on issues of embodiment and power relations and has published numerous articles on topics ranging from feminist humor to activism and pedagogy. She is currently finishing a book, "Roberta’s Rules," on feminist decision-making practices and has two new projects in various stages of development: a collection of essays on the central project of Monique Wittig's work, Annulling Gender, and a study of the LGBT choral movement.
Harriet Ellenberger was co-founding editor of the print journal Sinister Wisdom from 1976 to 1981, and from 2000 to 2003 edited a small web publication called She Is Still Burning. She lives in rural New Brunswick, where she and her partner are renovating an old farmhouse.
Carolyn Gage is a radical feminist, lesbian playwright. The author of more than fifty musicals and plays, she has written four books on lesbian theatre. Widely produced and published, she tours internationally in her own work, lecturing and offering workshops on lesbian theatre. Her catalog is online at www.carolyngage.com.
Dolores Klaich is the author of Woman Plus Woman: Attitudes Toward Lesbianism, Heavy Gilt (a spoof of a mystery whose theme is internalized heterosexism), short fiction, essays, and articles. She recently fled Sagaponack and now lives quietly in southern Vermont next door to a wonderful ancient graveyard.
Susan Kullmann is a Research Scholar at UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women, an instructional technology consultant at Scripps College, and managing director of a web development company. She taught history and women’s studies at Cal Poly Pomona and CSU, Long Beach, and has written about Victoria Woodhull. Blessed Are These Hands combines her appreciation of capturing an instant in a photograph, her computer expertise, and a long-term professional and personal interest in the history and contemporary meaning of women’s lives.
Adela C. Licona is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Women's Studies and Affiliated Faculty in Latina/o Studies at Iowa State University. Her research interests include chicana theory, borderlands' theories, cultural studies, and feminist rhetorics. Broadly defined, her work explores third-space as both a practice and a location. She investigates third-space (both/and) consciousness and its transformative potential. She is author of “(B)orderlands’ Rhetorics and Representations: The Transformative Potential of Third-Space Feminist Scholarship and Zines,” which appeared in the National Women’s Studies Association Journal. Her poem “La Migra” appeared in Sexing the Political: A Journal of Third Wave Feminism on Sexuality. She also served as co-editor for the special issue of the NWSA Journal titled “Moving Locations: The Politics of Identity in Motion.” She is currently co-producing a documentary film, agua miel: secrets of the agave, on women’s cooperatives in Juárez, Chihuahua México, and Anthony, New Mexico, with a focus on the funds of knowledge that inform local practices of sustainability in these locations. She has two daughters, who are her life’s tesoros.
Suzanne Montz Adams spent many years as a misguided CPA until she finally acknowledged the writer within. Her essays have been published in national magazines and she is currently marketing a novel for representation. She’s a student in Goddard College’s Individualized Master of Arts Program with a concentration in Transformative Language Arts. She lives in Texas with her husband and three teenage sons.
Barbara Mor, author of The Great Cosmic Mother, has published poetry, essays & experimental fiction in Sulfur, BullHead, Orpheus Grid, Studia Mystica; Brit journals Intimacy & Ecorche; The New MS & Trivia: a Journal of Ideas (1900-94). Online, “24/7 & Yr Dreams,” an essay-interview with Adam Engel, appeared in www.dissidentvoice.org June 14, 2004; “the secret pornographies of Republicans,” “What’s Left,” & “Preferably Knot” appeared in www.triviavoices.net, Feb 2005. Experimental fiction, “Oasis,” “Here,” & “Sea of Hunger” are online at www.ctheory.net, “A Thousand Days of Theory,” Aug 4, 05; Dec 12, 05; & April 12, 06 respectively.
Marge Piercy is the author of seventeen collections of poetry including November’s The Crooked Inheritance, What are Big Girls Made of?, The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme and Colors Passing through Us, all published by Knopf. Her seventeenth novel, Sex Wars, is out in Perennial paperback and concerns the turbulent period after the Civil War, centered on historical characters like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Victoria Woodhull. Her memoir Sleeping With Cats is in Harper Perennial. A CD of her political poetry, Louder We Can’t Hear You Yet, is out from Leapfrog Press. Her work has been translated into sixteen languages.
Illit Rosenblum (I. Rose) is a yoga and meditation instructor, artist, and community and peace activist with a background in Environmental Research and Social-cultural studies. She came to NYC in 1978 from (West) Jerusalem via a decade in Stockholm, Sweden.
Karin Spitfire is the 2007 Belfast Poet Laureate. Her first poetry book Standing with Trees came out in Nov. 2005. Her choreo-poems include Incest: It’s All Relative, Corpus Callosum, the original Standing with Trees, Sports and Art, and Wild Card Anatomy. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Currents: The Journal for Body-Mind Centering®. Spitfire has been writing, performing, teaching, and working as a healer for most of her adult life. She has pioneered an experiential methodology combining movement, bodywork, feminism, creative arts, and psychotherapeutic tools to address the healing of trauma. Spitfire works at home and abroad as freelance teacher of Women’s Studies, a certified practitioner of Body-Mind-Centering and an assistant wilderness guide with Her Wild Song.
Renate Stendhal, Ph.D. (www.renatestendhal.com) is a German-born, Paris-educated writer, writing coach and spiritual counselor with a private practice in San Francisco and Pt. Reyes Station. Among her publications are True Secrets of Lesbian Desire: Keeping Sex Alive in Long-Term Relationships and the Lambda Award-winning photobiography Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures. Her latest essay, “Thieves, Pimps, and Holy Prostitutes – My World” has just appeared in Identity Envy - Wanting to Be Who We’re Not, ed. Jim Tushinsky and Jim Van Buskirk (Haworth Press). She is working on an erotic novel set in Paris.
Sue Swartz lives in Bloomington, Indiana, where she teaches and consults on social change. Her poetry can be found in Cutthroat, Isotope, Smartish Pace, Jews., Lilith Magazine, and elsewhere. She was the winner of the 2006 Joy Harjo Poetry Competition and the 2nd place winner in the 2004 Charlotte Newberger Jewish Women’s Poetry contest. Much of her poetry uses Biblical text to explore current events and the human condition. She is totally obsessed with ballroom dancing, Middle East peace politics, and her 2 grandsons.
Marvelle Thompson artwork is influenced by the beauty and magic in the cycles of nature and the feminine face of the Divine. Creating art brings balance to her life. She has taught art to adults and children, and is a strong supporter of the visual and performing arts in the classroom. Blessed Are These Hands is a vow to creatively capture the feminine face of the Holy and, in some small way, repay the debt she owes to ALL women whose hands have embraced life and the constant battle for justice.
Lise Weil teaches in Goddard College’s IMA program and is currently at work on a memoir chronicling the highs and lows of late-twentieth-century feminism as she lived them.
Harriet Ellenberger was co-founding editor of the print journal Sinister Wisdom from 1976 to 1981, and from 2000 to 2003 edited a small web publication called She Is Still Burning. She lives in rural New Brunswick, where she and her partner are renovating an old farmhouse.
Carolyn Gage is a radical feminist, lesbian playwright. The author of more than fifty musicals and plays, she has written four books on lesbian theatre. Widely produced and published, she tours internationally in her own work, lecturing and offering workshops on lesbian theatre. Her catalog is online at www.carolyngage.com.
Dolores Klaich is the author of Woman Plus Woman: Attitudes Toward Lesbianism, Heavy Gilt (a spoof of a mystery whose theme is internalized heterosexism), short fiction, essays, and articles. She recently fled Sagaponack and now lives quietly in southern Vermont next door to a wonderful ancient graveyard.
Susan Kullmann is a Research Scholar at UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women, an instructional technology consultant at Scripps College, and managing director of a web development company. She taught history and women’s studies at Cal Poly Pomona and CSU, Long Beach, and has written about Victoria Woodhull. Blessed Are These Hands combines her appreciation of capturing an instant in a photograph, her computer expertise, and a long-term professional and personal interest in the history and contemporary meaning of women’s lives.
Adela C. Licona is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric and Women's Studies and Affiliated Faculty in Latina/o Studies at Iowa State University. Her research interests include chicana theory, borderlands' theories, cultural studies, and feminist rhetorics. Broadly defined, her work explores third-space as both a practice and a location. She investigates third-space (both/and) consciousness and its transformative potential. She is author of “(B)orderlands’ Rhetorics and Representations: The Transformative Potential of Third-Space Feminist Scholarship and Zines,” which appeared in the National Women’s Studies Association Journal. Her poem “La Migra” appeared in Sexing the Political: A Journal of Third Wave Feminism on Sexuality. She also served as co-editor for the special issue of the NWSA Journal titled “Moving Locations: The Politics of Identity in Motion.” She is currently co-producing a documentary film, agua miel: secrets of the agave, on women’s cooperatives in Juárez, Chihuahua México, and Anthony, New Mexico, with a focus on the funds of knowledge that inform local practices of sustainability in these locations. She has two daughters, who are her life’s tesoros.
Suzanne Montz Adams spent many years as a misguided CPA until she finally acknowledged the writer within. Her essays have been published in national magazines and she is currently marketing a novel for representation. She’s a student in Goddard College’s Individualized Master of Arts Program with a concentration in Transformative Language Arts. She lives in Texas with her husband and three teenage sons.
Barbara Mor, author of The Great Cosmic Mother, has published poetry, essays & experimental fiction in Sulfur, BullHead, Orpheus Grid, Studia Mystica; Brit journals Intimacy & Ecorche; The New MS & Trivia: a Journal of Ideas (1900-94). Online, “24/7 & Yr Dreams,” an essay-interview with Adam Engel, appeared in www.dissidentvoice.org June 14, 2004; “the secret pornographies of Republicans,” “What’s Left,” & “Preferably Knot” appeared in www.triviavoices.net, Feb 2005. Experimental fiction, “Oasis,” “Here,” & “Sea of Hunger” are online at www.ctheory.net, “A Thousand Days of Theory,” Aug 4, 05; Dec 12, 05; & April 12, 06 respectively.
Marge Piercy is the author of seventeen collections of poetry including November’s The Crooked Inheritance, What are Big Girls Made of?, The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme and Colors Passing through Us, all published by Knopf. Her seventeenth novel, Sex Wars, is out in Perennial paperback and concerns the turbulent period after the Civil War, centered on historical characters like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Victoria Woodhull. Her memoir Sleeping With Cats is in Harper Perennial. A CD of her political poetry, Louder We Can’t Hear You Yet, is out from Leapfrog Press. Her work has been translated into sixteen languages.
Illit Rosenblum (I. Rose) is a yoga and meditation instructor, artist, and community and peace activist with a background in Environmental Research and Social-cultural studies. She came to NYC in 1978 from (West) Jerusalem via a decade in Stockholm, Sweden.
Karin Spitfire is the 2007 Belfast Poet Laureate. Her first poetry book Standing with Trees came out in Nov. 2005. Her choreo-poems include Incest: It’s All Relative, Corpus Callosum, the original Standing with Trees, Sports and Art, and Wild Card Anatomy. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Currents: The Journal for Body-Mind Centering®. Spitfire has been writing, performing, teaching, and working as a healer for most of her adult life. She has pioneered an experiential methodology combining movement, bodywork, feminism, creative arts, and psychotherapeutic tools to address the healing of trauma. Spitfire works at home and abroad as freelance teacher of Women’s Studies, a certified practitioner of Body-Mind-Centering and an assistant wilderness guide with Her Wild Song.
Renate Stendhal, Ph.D. (www.renatestendhal.com) is a German-born, Paris-educated writer, writing coach and spiritual counselor with a private practice in San Francisco and Pt. Reyes Station. Among her publications are True Secrets of Lesbian Desire: Keeping Sex Alive in Long-Term Relationships and the Lambda Award-winning photobiography Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures. Her latest essay, “Thieves, Pimps, and Holy Prostitutes – My World” has just appeared in Identity Envy - Wanting to Be Who We’re Not, ed. Jim Tushinsky and Jim Van Buskirk (Haworth Press). She is working on an erotic novel set in Paris.
Sue Swartz lives in Bloomington, Indiana, where she teaches and consults on social change. Her poetry can be found in Cutthroat, Isotope, Smartish Pace, Jews., Lilith Magazine, and elsewhere. She was the winner of the 2006 Joy Harjo Poetry Competition and the 2nd place winner in the 2004 Charlotte Newberger Jewish Women’s Poetry contest. Much of her poetry uses Biblical text to explore current events and the human condition. She is totally obsessed with ballroom dancing, Middle East peace politics, and her 2 grandsons.
Marvelle Thompson artwork is influenced by the beauty and magic in the cycles of nature and the feminine face of the Divine. Creating art brings balance to her life. She has taught art to adults and children, and is a strong supporter of the visual and performing arts in the classroom. Blessed Are These Hands is a vow to creatively capture the feminine face of the Holy and, in some small way, repay the debt she owes to ALL women whose hands have embraced life and the constant battle for justice.
Lise Weil teaches in Goddard College’s IMA program and is currently at work on a memoir chronicling the highs and lows of late-twentieth-century feminism as she lived them.