Nancy Agabian was born in 1968 to Armenian American parents in Walpole, Massachusetts, where she grew up. In 1990, she moved to Los Angeles, where she started writing poetry in Michelle T. Clinton’s multicultural women’s poetry workshop at Beyond Baroque Literary/Art Center in Venice, CA.

Norma Alarcón is a noted Chicana theorist and scholar. She is Professor Emeritus of Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley. She received her doctorate in Latin American Literature and Culture from Indiana University. Her path breaking essays shaped Chicana Studies and paved the way for contemporary theories of Chicana subjectivity. 

The daughter of a Laguna Pueblo, Sioux and Scottish mother, and a Lebanese-American father, Paula Gunn Allen was raised in a small New Mexican village. A major Native American poet, writer, lecturer, and scholar, Allen has won many awards, including the American Book Award and the Susan Koppleman Award. 

Gloria Anzaldúa was a Chicana tejana-lesbian-feminist poet, theorist, and fiction writer from South Texas. In addition to authoring Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute, 1987), she was the editor of the critical anthology Making Face/Making Soul: Haciendo Caras (Aunt Lute, 1990) and co-editor of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Persephone, 1981), winner of the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award.

Ann Elizabeth Armstrong holds an M.F.A. in Directing and a Ph.D. in Theatre from the University of Hawaii at Manoa.  She is an Associate Professor of Theatre at Miami University in Oxford, OH, where she co-directs the “Finding Freedom Summer” project. 

Chyrell D. Bellamy (Bellamy-Sarr) has been an educator, advocate and activist in the AIDS field since 1987, specifically on behalf of women and people of color.

Piyali Bhattacharya is a writer, editor, and writing instructor based in Nashville, TN where she is Writer-in-Residence at Vanderbilt University.

Merlinda Bobis, a Filipina-Australian writer and performer, swears by the joys of the palate and the senses. “It is not simply about consumption of food or words, but delight in all their possible evocations—it is, after all, a shame not to do justice to the little pink animal in the mouth.”

Sauda Burch is a black lesbian author living in Oakland

Sara Levi Calderón was born and raised Jewish in México City. She married, gave birth to two children, got divorced, became a sociologist, and then fell in love and learned the wonders of becoming a lesbian.

Norma Cantú, Professor, received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Texas A&I at Laredo and Kingsville, respectively, and her Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. At Laredo State University, later renamed Texas A&M International University, she taught and served as Chair and Interim Dean.

Nick Carbó is the author of two books of poetry, El Grupo McDonald’s (1995) and Secret Asian Man (2000), both published by Tia Chucha Press.

Tejana born feminist historian Antonia Castañeda received her Ph.D. in U.S. History at Stanford University. Now retired, she taught in Chicana/o and Women’s Studies at UC Santa Barbara, and in the Departments of History at UT Austin and St. Mary’s University in San Antonio. Castañeda’s scholarly publications include the prizing winning “Women of Color and the Re-Writing of Western History.”

Carol Comfort (Cherokee/Choctaw), also of German and Irish descent, is the mother of three children, a teacher, writer, and social activist.

T. Jackie Cuevas is an Assistant Professor of Latina/o Literary and Cultural Studies in the Department of English. Her research focuses on questions of gender and sexuality in Latina/o literature.

DeeAnne Davis is published in various anthologies as a poet, but Aunt Lute published her first piece of fiction. She is an editor and writer of her own solo performance pieces. Davis has taught theatre workshops with youth, women, and low-income adults.

Juliana Delgado Lopera is an award-winning Colombian writer and oral-historian based in San Francisco.

Born near San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1933, Carmen de Monteflores came to the United States at age sixteen to study art at Wellesley College, where she received a B.A. in 1953.

Carolyn Dunn (Creek/Seminole/Cherokee/Choctaw), also of French Creole and Cajun descent, is a wife, mother, daughter, journalist, teacher, poet, fiction writer and catechist born in Southern California.

Jyl Lynn Felman is an award-winning writer, cultural activist, and performance artist whose work has appeared in over twenty newspapers, literary journals, and anthologies. She has been featured on radio, including BBC and NPR. Her short story collection Hot Chicken Wings (Aunt Lute Books, 1995) was a Lambda Literary finalist.

Leela Fernandes is a Professor of Women’s Studies and Political Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Professor Fernandes specializes in comparative politics, international feminism, and South Asian studies, and previously taught at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and Oberlin College.

Kleya Forté-Escamilla was born in Calexico, California, and grew up in southwestern Arizona and in Baja California, Mexico. “I have traveled past the crossroads y mis zapatos todavía tienen mucha suela (and my shoes still have a lot of leather)!” She has a B.A. in Art, another in French/Philosophy, and an M.A. in Creative Writing.

Ibis Gómez-Vega was born in the back of a taxi cab in Havana, Cuba. Once, she met Gertrude Stein in a carnival in Oklahoma. Another time she had dinner with Tee Corinne in Baba Yega’s in Montrose. She often wonders about the connection between the accident of her birth and her own human relevance on this sad planet.

Judy Grahn is an internationally known poet, writer, and social theorist. She currently serves as co-director and executive core faculty of the Women’s Spirituality Program at Sofia University in Palo Alto, CA.

Laurie Grobman received her Ph.D. in English from Lehigh University in 20th Century American Literature/Multicultural Literature. She has published criticism on the work of Sandra Cisneros, Judith Ortiz-Cofer, and Toni Morrison, among others, as well as theoretical work on pedagogical issues.

Editor of El Mundo Zurdo.

Playwright, writer, artist, and producer Imani Harrington’s writing and ideas on HIV/AIDS have been featured in numerous magazines, newspapers and abstracts, as well as at local and national conferences.

Rabie Harris was born in Jamaica in 1944 and came to the U.S. in 1955. She has a B.S. in Sociology from Brooklyn College, a B.A. in English from Pace University, and an M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Houston.

Lisa Maria Hogeland holds a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University. She previously served as Acting Director and Acting Associate/Graduate Director of the Center for Women's Studies and now holds a joint appointment in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature and Women's Studies at the University of Cincinnati.

LeAnne Howe is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation and writes fiction, poetry, screenplays, creative non-fiction, plays, and scholarship that primarily deal with American Indian experiences.

Kathleen Juhl received her M.F.A. in Acting and Directing from University of North Carolina at Greensboro and her Ph.D. in Performance Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is Associate Professor of Theatre and former Chair of Feminist Studies at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas.

Ginu Kamani was born in Bombay, India and moved to the U.S. at age 14. She graduated with an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Asha Kanwar is an Indian woman who lives in New Delhi where she teaches English at the Indira Gandhi National Open University.

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, a writer, activist, and professor, was born in 1945 in Brooklyn, and has worked in social change movements since the sixties. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California at Berkeley, where she taught the first Women’s Studies course in the department.

Ellen Kuzwayo grew up in the country, but lived most of her life in the city. She spent time as a “disgruntled schoolteacher”, social worker, mother, wife, and in her sixties returned to study at the University of the Witwatersrand for a higher qualification in social work.

Poet Audre Lorde was born in New York City on February 18, 1934 to Linda Belmar and Frederick Byron Lorde, immigrants from Grenada. She wrote her first poem when she was in the eighth grade.

Larissa M. Mercado-López is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at California State University, Fresno. She received her doctorate in English/Latina LIterature in 2011 from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her research areas include Chicana feminism, maternal studies, and feminist approaches to Latina fitness and health.

Adrienne Mitchell is a literary translator and tenured professor who holds an M.Ed. in Educational Leadership with a focus on second language acquisition and pedagogy, as well as an M.A. in Romance Languages from the University of Oregon.

Born in Madrid in 1951, Rosa Montero has been a journalist for Madrid’s daily newspaper, El Pais, since 1976. She has published 11 novels, many of which have been bestsellers in Spain. Beautiful and Dark is the third of Montero’s novels to be translated into English.

Cherry Muhanji received her Ph.D. in English, anthropology, and African American World Studies from the University of Iowa. She was awarded the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award for Tight Spaces (1987), which she co-edited with Kesho Scott and Egyirba High.

Born in El Campo, Texas, Emma Pérez has published essays in history and feminist theory as well as The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History. Her novel, Gulf Dreams, was first published in 1996 and was considered to be one of the first Chicana lesbian novels in print.

Domino Renee Perez is an Associate Professor of English and Native American Studies at the University of Texas, San Antonio, received her PhD from Cornell University.

Dawn Karima Pettigrew is the author of two novels, The Way We Make Sense (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 2002) and The Marriage of Saints (Norman: University of Oklahoma, 2006), and co-author of Children Learn (Cleveland: UCC, 2005), a book about multiculturalism and spirituality in children’s literature.

Sara A. Ramírez, Post-Doctoral Associate in Chicano and Latino studies at the University of Minnesota, earned her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on representations of historical and intergenerational trauma in Chicanx cultural productions. She has taught women’s studies courses at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She is also the first member of a national collective working to revitalize the historic Third Woman Press.

Penny Rosenwasser is Events Coordinator for the Middle East Children’s Alliance and a long-time activist with (and a founding board member of) Jewish Voice for Peace. She has been organizing around a large spectrum of peace and social justice issues for over forty years, including full human rights for Palestinians and Israelis.

Sonia Saldívar-Hull is a Professor of English and the founding Director of the Women's Studies Institute at University of Texas, San Antonio, where she also directs the Women's Studies Program. Feminism on the Border: Chicana Politics and Literature, her book on Chicana feminist literature, feminism, and the cultural intersections of borderland studies. She has been co-editor of Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nations, a book series with Duke University Press, since 1997.

For nearly twenty years, Jo Scott-Coe has worked as a writer, teacher, and scholar at institutions throughout Southern California. Her writing on intersections of education, gender, and violence has appeared in many publications, including The Lost Angeles Times, So to Speak, and Green Mountains Review.

Martha Shelley, a self-described “red-diaper baby” and longtime feminist activist, was raised in a Jewish home. As a child at Passover, she “always wanted to ask the Four Questions, but I wasn’t a youngest son or any kind of son at all.” She has authored two books of poetry, Crossing the DMZ and Lovers and Mothers.

ire’ne lara silva lives in Austin, TX, and is the author of two chapbooks: ani’mal and INDíGENA. Her first collection of poetry, furia, was published by Mouthfeel Press in October 2010 and received an Honorable Mention for the 2011 International Latino Book Award in Poetry.

Lara Stapleton was born and raised in East Lansing, Michigan and lived for some time in Manila, Philippines. She is currently a part-time faculty member in the English Department at Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus and is working on her first novel. Her work has appeared in numerous journals.

​Eileen Tabios is the author of the poetry collection Beyond Life Sentences (Anvil 1998), which received the Philippine National Book Award for Poetry; a book of poetry, essays, and interviews Black Lightning: Poetry-in-Progress (AAWW 1998), which received a Witter Bynner Poetry Grant; and a collection of prose and poetry, Ecstatic Mutations: Experiments in the Poetry Laboratory (Giraffe Books 2000).

Judith Tannenbaum, who currently serves as training coordinator for San Francisco’s WritersCorps program, has been poet-in-residence in many community settings, from primary schools to maximum security prisons.

Rita E. Urquijo-Ruiz is a Mexicana/Chicana who claims Sonora and California as her homes. She is an Associate of Spanish in Modern Languages & Literatures at Trinity University. Her areas of interest are Mexican and Chicana/o literatures and cultures, gender/sexuality, and theater/performance studies.

Diana L. Veléz was born in San Sebastián, Puerto Rico. Her family emigrated to the United States when she was four years old.

Dan Vera’s a writer, editor, and literary historian. The author of two poetry collections: Speaking Wiri Wiri, inaugural winner of the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize, and The Space Between Our Danger and Delight, his work has appeared in various publications and university curricula. 

Alice Walker, winner of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for The Color Purple, has earned international recognition as one of the major writers of our time.

WOSAD (Women of South Asian Descent) Collective first came together as students at UC Berkeley to compile writings by South Asian women.

Ding Xiaoqi was born in Shenyang, China in 1959. At age nine, she was separated from her parents, who were sent down to the countryside for re-education during the Cultural Revolution. She grew up alone in an empty apartment full of books. Ding Xiaoqi was a performer in the People’s Liberation Army Art Academy.

As a lesbian of African American descent, Gloria Yamato is settling into the satisfaction of writing for a living. She has worked for many years with social service and social change organizations.

Geling Yan is one of the most prominent writers in the Chinese language today and a well-established writer in English. Born in Shanghai to a novelist father and actress mother, she entered the Chinese People’s Liberation Army at age 12 and served as a ballet and folk dancer in military performance troupes.