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Anna Malaika Tubbs
Anna Malaika Tubbs is an author, advocate, educator, scholar, and DEI consultant who uses an intersectional lens to advocate for women of color and educate others. She has a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge where her focus was addressing gender and race issues in the US, especially the pervasive erasure of Black women. She is best known as the author of The New York Times best-selling book The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation. Her other articles have been featured in TIME Magazine, New York Magazine, The Guardian, and The Huffington Post.
Sylvia Rivera
Sylvia Rivera was a Latina-American drag queen, gay liberation and transgender rights activist, and a noted community worker in New York City. She was a prominent figure in the Stonewall uprising in 1969 and was a co-founder of the Gay Liberation Front. With Marsha P. Johnson, she established the political organization STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, now Street Transgender Action Revolutionaries). In honor of Rivera’s activism, The Sylvia Rivera Law Project was founded in 2002 to give gay, trans and gender-fluid individuals access to legal services.
bell hooks
bell hooks was an American author, professor, feminist, and activist whose work examined the connections between race, gender, and class. She often explored the varied perceptions of Black women and Black women writers and the development of feminist identities. Throughout her career, she was a professor at a number of universities, including the University of Southern California and Yale University. In the 1980s, hooks established a support group for black women called the Sisters of the Yam. She has also written a number of books including Feminist Theory from Margin to Center (1984) and Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992). The focus of her work was to explore the intersectionality of race, capitalism, gender, and what she described as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. She published around 40 books which ranged from essays to poetry to children’s books.
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison was an American novelist who has written many notable works about the African american experience, especially as an African American woman. Significant books she has written include The Bluest Eye (1970), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), and Beloved (1987 which she won a Pulitzer Prize for). She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993 and was the first black woman of any nationality to win the prize.
Marsha P Johnson
Marsha P. Johnson was a revolutionary LGBTQ activist, self-identified drag queen, performer, and survivor. She was a prominent figure in the Stonewall uprising in 1969. Later on, she established the Street Transvestite (now Transgender) Action Revolutionaries (STAR), with Sylvia Rivera, which is a group committed to helping homeless transgender youth in New York City. Up until her death in 1992, Johnson was an AIDS activist with ACT UP, an international, grassroots political group working to end the AIDS pandemic.
Helen Zia
Helen Zia is a Chinese-American journalist and activist for Asian American and LGBTQIA+ rights who is considered a key figure in the Asian American movement. Zia has authored many books including Last Boat out of Shanghai, Asian American Dreams, and My Country Versus Me. She was the executive editor of Ms. Magazine and a founding board co-chair of the Women’s Media Center. Her groundbreaking articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in many publications, books, and anthologies, receiving numerous awards.
Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou was a civil rights activist, poet, educator, and award-winning author. She rose to prominence with the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings in 1969 which tells of her life up to age 17 and brought her international acclaim. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2010 by president Barack Obama and received more than 50 honorary degrees throughout her life. In 2022 she became the first black woman to be featured on the US quarter.
Patsy Mink
Patsy Mink was the first woman of color elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as the representative of Hawaii. She was the first Asian-American woman to serve in Congress and the first Asian-American to run for U.S. President. Bills she wrote include Title IX, the Early Childhood Education Act, and the Women’s Educational Equity Act.
Kimberle Crenshaw
Kimberle Crenshaw is a pioneering scholar and writer on civil rights, critical race theory, Black feminist legal theory, and race, racism, and the law. She is a professor at Columbia Law School and the University of California, Los Angeles. She was nominated as Professor of the Year by both the 1991 and 1994 graduating classes at UCLA. Crenshaw is known for the introduction and development of intersectionality theory and its sub-category intersectional feminism.
Marjane Satrapi
Marjane Satrapi is an Iranian-born French artist, director, and writer whose graphic novels explore the gaps between Eastern and Western cultures. Her best-known works include the graphic novel Persepolis and its film adaptation, the graphic novel Chicken with Plums, and the Marie Curie biopic Radioactive. The film adaption of Persepolis was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the 80th Academy Awards making Satrapi the first woman to be nominated for the award. She now lives in Paris and is a regular contributor to magazines and newspapers around the world, including the New Yorker and the New York Times.
Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich was an award-winning American poet, essayist, and feminist. She wrote more than a dozen volumes of poetry and several non-fiction books which have been studied in literature and women’s studies courses. She was called “one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century” and was credited with bringing “the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse”.
Sally Ride
Sally Ride was an American astronaut and physicist who joined NASA in 1978. In 1983 she became the first American woman in space and the third woman in space overall. After NASA, she worked at Stanford University Center for International Security and Arms Control and then as a professor of physics at UCSD and the director of the California Space Institute. Following her retirement, she co-founded Sally Ride Science which is a company that creates science programs and publications targeted at elementary and middle school girls. The company was acquired by UCSD in 2015 and is run by Ride’s partner Tam O’Shaughnessy. Ride is the first space traveler to have been recognized as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community.
Haunani-Kay Trask
Haunani-Kay Trask was a Hawaiian activist, educator, author, and poet who served as leader of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. She was a founding member of the Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawai’i at Mãnoa and served as its director for ten years. In 1993, she wrote the book From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai’i which has been described as a “foundational text” about indigenous rights.
Roxane Gay
Roxane Gay is an American writer, professor, editor, and social commentator. She is the author of The New York Times best-selling essay collection Bad Feminist (2014), Hunger (2017), Ayiti (2011), An Untamed State (2014), and Difficult Women (2017). She was previously a professor at Eastern Illinois University, Purdue University, and Yale University. In addition to her many publications, she is an opinion writer at The New York Times, founder of Tiny Hardcore Press, essays editor for The Rumpus, co-editor of PANK, and editor of Gay Mag. Much of Gay’s work deals with the analysis and deconstruction of feminist and racial issues through the lens of her personal experience with race, gender identity, and sexuality.
Alicia Garza
Alicia Garza is an American civil rights activist and writer who is known for co-founding the international Black Lives Matter movement. Garza attended UCSD for her undergraduate degree and helped organize the first Women in Color Conference held there in 2002. She founded the Black Futures Lab to make Black communities powerful in politics.
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