Liz Henry | |
|---|---|
 Henry at Kiwicon in Wellington, New Zealand in 2012 | |
| Born | 1969 (age 54–55) |
| Occupation(s) | Blogger, author, translator, technologist, activist |
Liz Henry (born 1969) is an American blogger, author, translator, technologist, and activist. She is a co-founder of the first women's hackerspace in San Francisco, Double Union, [1] where she is still active. [2] She is also an advocate for disability technology and hacking existing technology for use by disabled people. [3]
Henry is a senior release manager at Twitch. [4] Previously, she was the Firefox release manager and bugmaster for Mozilla. [5] She has also served on the advisory board of the GimpGirl Community and The Ada Initiative. In 2005, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Henry flew to Houston to help the evacuees. She worked with Technology For All to help people use technology to reconnect and rebuild. [6]
In 2007, Henry co-organized BarCampBlock in Palo Alto, California. [7] [8]
In 2011, Henry played a key role in the unveiling of A Gay Girl In Damascus . [9] [10] She questioned whether the purported writer of the blog, Amina Arraf, actually existed. [11]
In 2012, Aqueduct Press published a book of her poems, Unruly Islands. Henry also edited The WisCon Chronicles: Vol. 3: The Carnival of Feminist SF ISBN 978-1-933500-30-0, the third of a series of anthologies of articles about, or inspired by, the feminist science fiction convention WisCon, held every year in Madison, Wisconsin. [12]
In 2017, Cardboard House Press published her translation of Chilean poet and writer Carmen Berenguer's book My Lai. [13]
Henry and Danny O'Brien married in October 2018. [14]
Feminist science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction focused on such feminist themes as: gender inequality, sexuality, race, economics, reproduction, and environment. Feminist SF is political because of its tendency to critique the dominant culture. Some of the most notable feminist science fiction works have illustrated these themes using utopias to explore a society in which gender differences or gender power imbalances do not exist, or dystopias to explore worlds in which gender inequalities are intensified, thus asserting a need for feminist work to continue.
Science fiction and fantasy serve as important vehicles for feminist thought, particularly as bridges between theory and practice. No other genres so actively invite representations of the ultimate goals of feminism: worlds free of sexism, worlds in which women's contributions are recognized and valued, worlds that explore the diversity of women's desire and sexuality, and worlds that move beyond gender.
DNA Lounge is an all-ages nightclub and restaurant/cafe in the SoMa district of San Francisco owned by Jamie Zawinski, a former Netscape programmer and open-source software hacker. The club features DJ dancing, live music, burlesque performances, and occasionally conferences, private parties, and film premieres.
WisCon or Wiscon, a Wisconsin science fiction convention, is the oldest, and often called the world's leading, feminist science fiction convention and conference. It was first held in Madison, Wisconsin in February 1977, after a group of fans attending the 1976 34th World Science Fiction Convention in Kansas City was inspired to organize a convention like WorldCon but with feminism as the dominant theme. The convention is held annually in May, during the four-day weekend of Memorial Day. Sponsored by the Society for the Furtherance and Study of Fantasy and Science Fiction, or (SF)³, WisCon gathers together fans, writers, editors, publishers, scholars, and artists to discuss science fiction and fantasy, with emphasis on issues of feminism, gender, race, and class.
Christopher Reaves Messina is an American blogger, product consultant and speaker who is the inventor of the hashtag as it is currently used on social media platforms. In a 2007 tweet, Messina proposed vertical/associational grouping of messages, trends, and events on Twitter by the means of hashtags. The hashtag was intended to be a type of metadata tag that allowed users to apply dynamic, user-generated tagging, which made it possible for others to easily find messages with a specific digger theme or content. It allowed easy, informal markup of folksonomy without need of any formal taxonomy or markup language. Hashtags have since been referred to as the "eavesdroppers", "wormholes", "time-machines", and "veins" of the Internet.
How do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?
Nisi Shawl is an African American writer, editor, and journalist. They are best known as an author of science fiction and fantasy short stories who writes and teaches about how fantastic fiction might reflect real-world diversity of gender, sexual orientation, race, physical ability, age, and other sociocultural factors.
Mitch Altman is a Berlin-based hacker and inventor of TV-B-Gone. He is a featured speaker at hacker conferences, an international expert on the hackerspace movement, and teaches introductory electronics workshops. He is also Chief Scientist and CEO of Cornfield Electronics.
A hackerspace is a community-operated, often "not for profit", workspace where people with common interests, such as computers, machining, technology, science, digital art, or electronic art, can meet, socialize, and collaborate. Hackerspaces are comparable to other community-operated spaces with similar aims and mechanisms such as Fab Lab, men's sheds, and commercial "for-profit" companies.
Laura Quilter is a writer, lawyer, librarian, professor, and science fiction fan known for both her work on intellectual property and new media, and her long-standing archive of information on feminist science fiction.
K. Tempest Bradford is an African-American science fiction and fantasy author and editor. She was a non-fiction and managing editor with Fantasy Magazine from 2007 to 2009, and has edited fiction for Peridot Books, The Fortean Bureau, and Sybil's Garage. She is the author of Ruby Finley vs. the Interstellar Invasion, her debut middle grade novel published in 2022, which won the Andre Norton Award in 2023.
TOG is a hackerspace in Dublin, Ireland. tóg is a word in the Irish language; one of its meanings is 'to build or construct'.
Andrea Hairston is an African-American science fiction and fantasy playwright and novelist. Her novel Redwood and Wildfire won the James Tiptree Jr. Award for 2011. Mindscape, Hairston's first novel, won the Carl Brandon Parallax Award and was short-listed for the Philip K. Dick Award and the James Tiptree Jr. Award. Hairston was one of the Guests of Honor at the science fiction convention Wiscon in May 2012.
Noisebridge is an anarchistic maker and hackerspace located in San Francisco. It is inspired by the European hackerspaces Metalab in Vienna and c-base in Berlin. Noisebridge describes itself as "a space for sharing, creation, collaboration, research, development, mentoring, and learning". Outside of its headquarters, Noisebridge forms a wider international community. It was organized in 2007 and has had permanent facilities since 2008.
Valerie Anita Aurora is an American software engineer and feminist activist. She was the co-founder of the Ada Initiative, a non-profit organization that sought to increase women's participation in the free-culture movement, open-source technology, and open source culture. Aurora is also known within the Linux community for advocating new developments in filesystems in Linux, including ChunkFS and the Union file system. Her birth name was Val Henson, but she changed it shortly before 2009, choosing her middle name after the computer scientist Anita Borg. In 2012, Aurora, and Ada Initiative co-founder Mary Gardiner were named two of the most influential people in computer security by SC Magazine. In 2013, she won the O'Reilly Open Source Award.
shackspace is a Stuttgart hackerspace run by shack e.V., a non-profit association, established in 2009. Originally located in North Stuttgart, it moved to Stuttgart-Wangen in March 2011. It is among the largest and fastest-growing hackerspaces in Germany, with over 110 paying members. The mission of shackspace is to foster an environment where people can collaborate on ideas, share knowledge and talents, and explore aspects of life including science, technology, software development, arts and crafts and anything else members express an interest in. shackspace views itself as not only a physical workspace, but also a community of like-minded people.
Jeanne Gomoll is an American artist, writer, editor, and science fiction fan, who was recognized as one of the guests of honor at the 72nd World Science Fiction Convention, having been a guest of honor at numerous previous science fiction conventions. She has been nominated multiple times for awards in artist and fanzine categories, and for service to the genre of science fiction, particularly feminist science fiction.
Amelia Cousins Greenhall is an American feminist tech blogger. She cofounded feminist tech blog and publication Model View Culture with Shanley Kane. Greenhall is co-founder and Executive Director of Double Union, a feminist women-only hackerspace in San Francisco, with Valerie Aurora, and is a Quantified Self enthusiast. Greenhall is the publisher and co-founder of Open Review Quarterly, a literary journal on modern culture.
Carnival is a 2006 science fiction novel by Elizabeth Bear, published in the US by Bantam Spectra. It was nominated for a Philip K. Dick Award, a Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel and a Lambda Literary Award.
Double Union is a San Francisco hacker/maker space. Double Union was founded by women in 2013 with the explicit goal of fostering a creative safe space. The organization's mission is to be a community workshop where women and nonbinary people can work on projects in a comfortable, welcoming environment.
Liberating Ourselves Locally is a makerspace/hackerspace in the Fruitvale district of Oakland, California. It is part of the Bay Area Consortium of Hackerspaces (BACH).
The Hotel Utah is a historic mixed-use building known as a saloon bar, live music venue, and residential hotel, built in 1908 and located in the South of Market neighborhood of San Francisco, California. It is known for its diverse open mic nights, which have historically attracted some people who have later become famous. It is also known as The Utah Inn, The Hotel Utah Saloon, and simply The Utah.
