About the Contributors
Huma Ahmed-Ghosh teaches in the Department of Women's Studies at San Diego State University. Her research is on cultural adaptation strategies and identity formation of South Asian immigrant Muslim women in the USA. More recently, she is working on women in Afghanistan, Islam and feminism, and representation of women in right-wing nationalist discourse.
Until recently, Marilyn Anderson was an early-childhood teacher. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and "The Rivers Emerging" exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. She is a former winner in the Lake Superior Writers' Series and is currently collaborating with book artist Verne Anderson on a picture book for young children.
Angela Bowen teaches Women's Studies and Literature at California State University, Long Beach. Her latest publications are "Interdisciplinarily Speaking" (Feminist Teacher. Vol. 14 (1) and a short story, "Cornelia's Mother" (Sing, Whisper, Shout, Pray! Feminist Visions for a Just World. 2003. ed. M. Jacqui Alexander et al). She is currently working on an anthology, Irreducibly Audre Lorde: Critical Writings on Her Work and a book about Academic Africana Lesbians.
Clancy Cavnar's work is visionary and reflects her interest in several esoteric spiritual paths. She has experienced profound transformation in her studies of shamanism and plant teachers, and that is reflected in her work. Cavnar tries to convey what she perceives in her work and pays tribute to the spiritual world we cannot photograph or see with our physical eyes.
Ambreen Hai is Assistant Professor in the English Department at Smith College, where she teaches Anglophone postcolonial literature and contemporary literary theory. She is also on the Program Committees for Women's Studies and Comparative Literature. She is currently completing a book on literary agency and the body in Kipling, Forster, and Rushdie. [End Page 233]
Born in South Central Los Angeles in 1968, T.D. Hall divides her time between Chicago and her kitchen window in New England, where she can be found most nights staring out at the Quinnipiac River. A Cave Canem fellow, her writings have appeared in several journals and anthologies. Red was her mother's favorite color.
Brinda J. Mehta is Professor of French Studies at Mills College in Oakland, California, where she teaches classes in postcolonial African and Caribbean literatures and feminist theory. She is the author of a book on female representations in Balzac's novel, a manuscript on Indo-Caribbean feminism, and several articles on postcolonial literature. These essays have appeared in journals such as Callaloo, Journal of Caribbean Literature, and MaComère, among others.
Nelly Rosario was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in Brooklyn, New York. She earned an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. Her novel, Song of the Water Saints (Pantheon), won the 2002 PEN Open Book Award.
Elif Shafak was born in France, Strasbourg, in 1971, and spent her teenage years in Spain before returning to Turkey. In addition to her work as a novelist, Elif Shafak is also a political scientist, holding a Master's degree in Gender and Women Studies and continuing her Ph.D work in Political Thought as her major focus and Middle Eastern Studies as an additional area of interest. She is currently a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan.
Jennifer Bernhardt Steadman is Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Women's Studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. She received her Ph.D. in Women's Studies from Emory University. Her current book project, Traveling Economies, foregrounds the transgressive figure of the female traveler and analyzes the social forces arrayed against black and white women's autonomy in Antebellum America.
Jené Watson-Aifah, who was born on the Texas Gulf Coast, lives and teaches in Atlanta. She fell in love with Brazil in 1994 after watching the film Quilombo, and gives thanks to Angela Gilliam, Johnetta Cole, John Burdick, Katia Santos, and Kevin Sipp for leads and translations.
Arlene Zide, born in 1940 in New York City, is former editor of Primavera and is compiling an anthology of Chicago-area women poets with Carolyn Rodgers. Zide has been published in the United States, Canada, and India in journals such as Xanadu, Rattapallax, Colorado Review, [End Page 234] California Quarterly, A Room of Her Own, Off Our Backs, Rhino, and The Women's Review of Books. Her book, In their Own Voice: An Anthology of Contemporary Indian Women Poets, was published by Penguin Books Ltd. (India) in 1993.
Joyce Zonana's essay, "The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of Jane Eyre," first published in Signs, won the Florence Howe Award for Feminist Criticism. Currently completing a memoir, she is an Associate Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of New Orleans.
Born in Peña Prieta, a small mountain village of Oaxaca, Mexico,
Miguel Zafra's life as a Mixtec was steeped in tradition,
but full of difficulties. The Mixtecs inhabited the Oaxaca region
since pre-Aztec times, but were forced to move around to find work that
would support their families. Financial hardship in Mexico eventually
brought Zafra to the United States, but he still maintains his cultural
roots. Today, Zafra is a photographer for and a member of the Oaxacan
Indigenous Binational Front. This organization works in Mexico and the
United States to promote the cultural integrity of indigenous Oaxacans.
