Insider Histories of the Vietnam Era Underground Press, Part 1

About the Authors

About the Authors CHIP BERLET is senior analyst for Political Research Associates, a progressive think tank in Somerville, Massachusetts, devoted to supporting movements that are building a more just and inclusive democratic society. He freelances articles for a wide range of publications, from mainstream dailies to alternative magazines to scholarly journals. ALLEN COHEN is the author of Childbirth Is Ecstasy, the first of the new wave of books on natural childbirth; and The Reagan Poems. He also was founder and editor of the San Francisco Oracle. His chapter is revised from The San Francisco Oracle Facsimile Edition, a complete reprinting of the entire run of the Oracle in book form that was published in 1990. CAROL ANNE DOUGLAS worked on off our backs from 1973 until the fall of 2008. She supports herself by reporting for a nonprofit magazine. VICTORIA SMITH HOLDEN earned her doctorate degree from the University of Minnesota in 1993 with a special focus on media law. She was an associate professor of communication at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, where she taught classes in reporting, history, media law and regulations, communication and society, and propaganda. She had just been elected assistant director of the School of Communication and had recently finished a history of the school when she died of heart failure on June 13, 2008. Her chapter, from the original Voices from the Underground, was updated by editor Ken Wachsberger, based on talks with her before she passed away. SALLY GABB is a former staff member of the Great Speckled Bird and foremother of the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance (ALFA). She is currently a developmental reading specialist at Bristol Community College in Fall River, Massachusetts, after thirty years working with adult literacy in Providence, Rhode Island. She views herself as a refugee from revolution who has found meaning and delight through learning from her students in basic literacy and college reading programs. She spent the decade prior to the new millennium completing an 344 | About the Authors academic thesis focusing on what adult new readers have to teach us about learning (“words get in the way”) and is still in recovery from postgraduate insanity. She leads a life based on a variation of the Laurie Anderson credo: “I like subversion. The world needs it, and I like doing it.” Like Anderson, she believes the best efforts for revolution are those that work “in little ways that creep in.” DOUG GEORGE-KANENTIIO, Akwesasne Mohawk, was the editor of Akwesasne Notes as well as a co-founder of the Native American Journalists Association. He was a member of the board of trustees for the National Museum of the American Indian and helped establish Radio CKON. He is the author of three books on Iroquois history and culture. He currently resides on Oneida Territory with his wife, the singer Joanne Shenandoah. WILLIAM M. KUNSTLER was a founder, vice president, and volunteer staff attorney, the Center for Constitutional Rights, New York, New York. He died in 1995. His life is explored by his daughters Emily and Sarah in the documentary William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe. FRAN MOIRA worked on off our backs from 1971 to 1986. She is a professional health journalist. MARKOS MOULITSAS is the founder and publisher of the blog site dailykos.com, the author of Taking On the System: Rules for Radical Change in a Digital Era, and the coauthor of Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics. ABE PECK is professor emeritus in service and director of business-to-business communication at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. He is the author of Uncovering the Sixties: The Life and Times of the Underground Press, and an alumnus of the Chicago Seed and Rolling Stone. He consults to magazine companies worldwide. K. R. ROBERTO is the serials/electronic resources librarian at Penrose Library, University of Denver, and editor of Radical Cataloging: Essays at the Front. JACK A. SMITH was an editor for a major news agency before serving time in federal prison for challenging war and the Selective Service (conscription) system. Leaving prison in 1963, he joined the staff of the leftist Guardian weekly, where he remained for twenty-one years, becoming the editor in the process. He subsequently edited several magazines until 2000, when he started his own Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter—an e-mail publication subscribed to by several thousand peace and justice activists in upstate New York. He is a political and...