About the Contributors

ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS IFi amadiume is Professor ofReligion at Dartmouth College. Educated in Nigeria and Britain, she has written several books with a special focus on gender analysis. Her latest book is Daughters ofthe Goddess, Daughters ofImperialism: African Women, Culture, Poiver and Democracy (Zed Books, 2000). AMRITA BASU, a member of the Meridians Founding Advisory Board, teaches political science and women's and gender studies at Amherst College. She writes about women's activism, religious nationalism, and women's movements, primarilywith reference to India. She is the author of Tivo Faces ofProtest: Contrastine) Modes ofWomen's Activism in India, editor ofThe Challenge of Local Feminisms: Women's Movements in Global Perspective, and coeditor ofAppropriating Gender: Women's Activism and Politicized Religion in South Asia. maylei blackwell is an activist-scholar whose work examines how racial and sexual difference shapes the challenges and possibilities of transnational feminist organizing in the Americas. Currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University ofCalifornia, Berkeley, she co-edited the Women ofColor Resource Center's report to the un World Conference Against Racism entitled Time to Rise: us Women ofColot—Issues and Strategies, which can be ordered at . Marilyn chin's books ofpoems include Rhapsody in Plain Yellow andThe Phoenix Gone. Her translations include The Selected Poems o/Ai Qing. She has been anthologized most recently in The Norton Introduction to Poetry, andTheBestAmerican Poetry of1996. Herawards includetwo grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN-Josephine Miles Award, and the StegnerFellowship atStanford. She was featured in the PBS series The Language oflife. She teaches in the M.F.A. program atSan Diego State University and gives poetry readings and lectures all over the world. Maureen TOLMAN FLANNERY is an award-winning poet whose work has been published in overa hundred literary reviews and anthologies, including Atlanta Review, MidAmerica Poetry Review, and White Pelican 312 Review. She is the recipient of a 2001 Illinois Arts Award and two Pushcart Prize nominations. Her books are Secretofthe Rising Up: Poems ofMexico and Remembered into Life. Maureen is editor ofKnoiving Stones: Poems ofExotic Places. She works for a surgeon in Chicago where she lives with her actor husband Dan and their four children. paula giddings is the author oftwo books, When and Where I Enter: The ImpactofBIackWomen on Race and Sex inAmerica; and In Search ofSisterhood: Delta Sigma Theta and the Challenge ofthe Black Sorority Movement. She is currently Professor ofAfrican-American Studies at Smith College. inderpal grewal is Professor and Chair of the Department of Women's Studies at University ofCalifornia, Irvine. She is author of Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire and Cultures of Travel (Duke University Press, 1996) and co-editor (with Caren Kaplan) ofScattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices. At present she is working on a book entitled South Asian Transnationalities: Gender, Class, Ethnicity and Diaspora (forthcoming, Duke University Press) and, with Caren Kaplan, a textbook, Introduction to Women's Studies (forthcoming , McGraw Hill). suheir hammad is the author ofBorn Palestinian, Born Black and Drops 0/ This Story. Hammad's work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, and she has received several awards, including the Audre Lorde Poetry Award (1995 and 2000) and a Van Lier Fellowship. Bonnie Claudia Harrison holds a B.F.A. from the School ofthe Art Institute ofChicago, and an M.A. in Anthropology from the University ofTexas at Austin, where she is currently a doctoral candidate. She is writing her dissertation on the influence ofracial and ethnic identity on the creation and perception ofracial representations. meera kosambi is a sociologist, and has studied and taught in India, Sweden, and the U.S. Her major research fields are urban studies (mainly India's urbanization) and women's studies (specifically women in nineteenth-century western India). Her latest book is Pandita Ramabai through Her Own Words (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), as well as Pandita Ramabai's 'The Peoples ofthe United States' (1889) (forthcoming from Indiana University Press 2002). mary ANN LARKIN is a poet and writer. She has written The Coil ofthe Skin, a book ofpoems, and a chapbook, White Clapboard. Her poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland and New Letters, as well...