About the Contributors

Gabeba Baderoon is a South African poet and media scholar. Her poetry has appeared in New Contrast, Illuminations, and Feminist Studies. Baderoon's first collection, The Dream in the Next Body, will be published by Kwela Books in 2005. She is the winner of the DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Poetry for 2005.

Tamara Beauboeuf-Lafontant is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Education Studies at DePauw University. She has published articles on womanist pedagogy and is currently working on a project concerning constructions of beauty among African American women.

Donna M. Bickford, Ph.D., is a lecturer in the Women's Studies Program at the University of Rhode Island. Her areas of interest are contemporary women writers, literature of the Americas, and the connections between literature and social change. Her articles have been published in Transformations, Radical Teacher, and Pedagogy.

Yovannah Diovanti is a professional artist. Her work can be seen in some of Arizona's galleries, such as 55 Main Gallery in Bisbee, Arizona. While some of the artwork she produces is realistic, she mainly enjoys transferring onto canvas simple surrealistic visions. The Mexican culture, religion, and strong family values are great influences on her perspective as an artist. Her use of vibrant colors relates to the richness of the Latin culture.

Helena Grice is Lecturer in American and British Literature at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, UK. She is a feminist Asian Americanist who has published on ethnic feminism, Asian American women's fiction and auto/biography, and Chinese American history and trauma. Her latest books are Negotiating Identities: An Introduction to Asian American Women's Writing (Manchester University Press and St. Martin's Press, 2002) and Maxine Hong Kingston (Manchester University Press, 2005).

Amina Jamal is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Concordia University, Montreal. Her work investigates the ambivalent positioning of women-citizens through the intersection of Islamization and feminism at diverse sites. She is currently examining the politics of Jamaat-e-Islami women in Pakistan with a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Marie Lovrod has directed the Antioch College Women's Studies Abroad Program and taught Women's Studies at Hunter College, NYU, and Saint Francis Xavier University, Canada. This essay reflects a larger project on child abuse and uses of the category "child" in transnational contexts, supported by the Five Colleges Women's Studies Research Center in Massachusetts.

Susana S. Martínez is Assistant Professor at DePaul University. Her research interests include the Latin American testimonio, the representations of otherness in reality television, and travel narratives. She teaches courses on Central American fiction, cultural diversity of Latin America through film, and literature by U.S. Latinos/as. Her article "El retorno a la muerte en Contravida y 'El portón de los sueños' de Augusto Roa Bastos" appears in Ciberletras: Journal of Literary Criticism and Cultura 11 (2004). "Let's Go: Touring Gringo/a Identities in Travel Narratives to Guatemala" is published in Brújula: revista interdisciplinaria sobre estudios latinoamericanos 3 (December 2004) in a special issue titled "Utopian Passports: Travel, Immigration, and Diaspora in Latin America."

Glenis Redmond is a single mom of twin fifteen-year-old girls, Amber and Celeste. Her works have been recently published in Stanford University's Black Arts Quarterly, Warren Wilson College's Heartstone, and African Voices. She performs nationwide as well as teaches at the Kennedy Center.

Miriam Thaggert is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she teaches classes in African American literature and culture. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley. Her current research centers on the body and the intersections between the visual and the textual.

Allison Whittenberg is the author of a chapbook, The Bard of Philadelphia (Rosewater Press, 2003) and a novel, Sweet Thang (Random House, 2006). She holds a master's degree in English from the University of Wisconsin.