Sarah Miriam Schulman is an American novelist, playwright, nonfiction writer, screenwriter, gay activist, and AIDS historian. She holds an endowed chair in nonfiction at Northwestern University and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities. She is a recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award and the Lambda Literary Award.
Larissa Lai is an American-born Canadian novelist and literary critic. She is a recipient of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction and Lambda Literary Foundation's 2020 Jim Duggins, PhD Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize.
Blanche McCrary Boyd is an American author. She is currently the Roman and Tatiana Weller Professor of English and Writer-in-Residence at Connecticut College.
Barbara Smith is an American lesbian feminist and socialist who has played a significant role in Black feminism in the United States. Since the early 1970s, she has been active as a scholar, activist, critic, lecturer, author, and publisher of Black feminist thought. She has also taught at numerous colleges and universities for 25 years. Smith's essays, reviews, articles, short stories and literary criticism have appeared in a range of publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The Black Scholar, Ms., Gay Community News, The Guardian, The Village Voice, Conditions and The Nation. She has a twin sister, Beverly Smith, who is also a lesbian feminist activist and writer.
Michelle Tea is an American author, poet, and literary arts organizer whose autobiographical works explore queer culture, feminism, race, class, sex work, and other topics. She is originally from Chelsea, Massachusetts and has identified with the San Francisco, California literary and arts community for many years. She currently lives in Los Angeles. Her books, mostly memoirs, are known for their exposition of the queercore community.
Sue-Ellen Case is Professor and Chair of Critical Studies in the Theatre Department in the School of Theater Film and Television at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Martin Bauml Duberman is an American historian, biographer, playwright, and gay rights activist. Duberman is Professor of History Emeritus at Lehman College in the Bronx, New York City.
Firebrand Books is a publishing house established in 1984 by Nancy K. Bereano, a lesbian and feminist activist, in Ithaca, NY. Karen Oosterhouse, its publisher since 2003, describes Firebrand as "the independent publisher of record for feminist and lesbian fiction and nonfiction," championing "authors whose work has been marginalized: women of color, women coming out of poverty, trans women, the genderqueer, and other underrepresented voices." It is among the many feminist and lesbian publishing houses that grew out of the Women's Press Movement; other presses of that period include Naiad Press, Persephone and Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.
Minnie Bruce Pratt was an American poet, educator, activist, and essayist. She retired in 2015 from her position as Professor of Writing and Women's Studies at Syracuse University where she was invited to help develop the university's first LGBT studies program.
Terry Wolverton is an American novelist, memoirist, poet, and editor. Her book Insurgent Muse: Life and Art at the Woman's Building, a memoir published in 2002 by City Lights Books, was named one of the "Best Books of 2002" by the Los Angeles Times, and was the winner of the 2003 Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award, and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her novel-in-poems Embers was a finalist for the PEN USA Litfest Poetry Award and the Lambda Literary Award.
Jeanne Córdova was an American writer and supporter of the lesbian and gay rights movement, founder of The Lesbian Tide, and a founder of the West Coast LGBT movement. A former Catholic nun, Córdova was a second-wave feminist lesbian activist and self-described butch.
Julia Penelope was an American linguist, author, and philosopher. She was part of an international movement of critical thinkers on lesbian and feminist issues. A self-described "white, working-class, fat butch dyke who never passed," she started what she called "rabble rousing" when she was a young woman.
Transgender studies, also called trans studies or trans* studies, is an interdisciplinary field of academic research dedicated to the study of gender identity, gender expression, and gender embodiment, as well as to the study of various issues of relevance to transgender and gender variant populations. Interdisciplinary subfields of transgender studies include applied transgender studies, transgender history, transgender literature, transgender media studies, transgender anthropology and archaeology, transgender psychology, and transgender health. The research theories within transgender studies focus on cultural presentations, political movements, social organizations and the lived experience of various forms of gender nonconformity. The discipline emerged in the early 1990s in close connection to queer theory. Non-transgender-identified peoples are often also included under the "trans" umbrella for transgender studies, such as intersex people, crossdressers, drag artists, third gender individuals, and genderqueer people.
Ann Luja Cvetkovich is a Professor and former Director of the Feminist Institute of Social Transformation at Carleton University in Ottawa. Until 2019, she was the Ellen Clayton Garwood Centennial Professor of English and Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, where she had been the founding director of the LGBTQ Studies Program, launched in 2017. She has published three books: Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (1992); An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (2003); and Depression: A Public Feeling (2012). She has also co-edited Articulating the Global and Local: Globalization and Cultural Studies (1996) with Douglas Kellner, as well as Political Emotions: New Agendas in Communication (2010) with Janet Staiger and Ann Reynolds. Furthermore, Cvetkovich has co-edited a special issue of Scholar and Feminist Online, entitled "Public Sentiments" with Ann Pellegrini. She is also a former co-editor of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies with Annamarie Jagose.
Marusya Bociurkiw is a Canadian born, Ukrainian film-maker, writer, scholar, and activist. She has published six books, including a novel, poetry collection, short story collection, and a memoir. Her narrative and critical writing have been published in a variety of journals and collections. Bociurkiw has also directed and co-directed ten films and videos which have been screened at film festivals on several continents. Her work appears in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the National Archives of Canada, and many university libraries. She founded or co-founded the media organizations Emma Productions, Winds of Change Productions, and The Studio for Media Activism & Critical Thought. She currently lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada where she is an associate professor in the RTA School of Media Studies, Toronto Metropolitan University. She teaches courses on social justice media, activist media production, and gender/race/queer theories of time-based and digital media. She is also Director of The Studio for Media Activism & Critical Thought at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Bonnie Zimmerman is an American literary critic and women's studies scholar. She is the author of books and articles exploring lesbian history and writings, women's literature, women's roles, and feminist theory. She has received numerous prestigious awards.
Marcia Ochoa is a United States-based professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. They are the co-founder of El/La Para TransLatinas and is credited with popularizing the term "translatina."
Nancy K. Bereano is an American editor and publisher. She founded Firebrand Books, an influential lesbian feminist press, in 1984 and ran it until her retirement in 2000.
Bonnie J. Morris is an American scholar of women's studies. She completed a PhD in women's history at Binghamton University in 1989 and has taught at various universities including Georgetown University, George Washington University, and University of California, Berkeley.
Barbara Wilson is the pen name of Barbara Sjoholm, an American writer, editor, publisher, and translator. She co-founded two publishing companies: Seal Press and Women in Translation Press. As Barbara Sjoholm, she is the author of memoir, essays, a biography, and travelogues, including The Pirate Queen: In Search of Grace O’Malley and Other Legendary Women of the Sea, which was a finalist for the PEN USA award in creative nonfiction. She is also a translator of fiction and nonfiction by Norwegian and Danish writers into English, and won the Columbia Translation Award and the American-Scandinavian Translation Award. As Barbara Wilson, she has written two mystery series and has won several awards for her mystery novels, including the British Crime Writers Association award and the Lambda Literary Award. She is known for her novel Gaudi Afternoon, which was made into a film directed by Susan Seidelman in 2001.
