Batya Weinbaum, Editor

Batya Weinbaum taught multicultural literature at Cleveland State University, 1998-2003. She currently teaches humanities, myth and modern life, image of women and civilization, and introduction to womens' studies online at SUNY– Empire State College, Center for Distance Learning, where she has worked since 2007. She has worked as a Subject Matter Expert designing a course based on the Virgin of Guadalupe as a Great Cosmic Mother for Ivy Bridge College of Tiffin University, where she also taught writing; she works as a skills flex advisor at Gaia University and just came onboard as an English instructor at American Public University System.

In 2012 she published On the Palmist Road; in 2013 Feminist Voices will appear from Aqueduct Press. In 2010, her published  novel Nightmares of Sasha Weitzwoman appeared with Femspec Books, an imprint of Femspec. She received her Ph.D. from University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1996, and a Masters from SUNY Buffalo in American Studies in 1986. She has published Islands of Women and Amazons: Representations and Realities (U of Texas Press, 1999); two books of feminist theory with South End Press; a collection of short stories with Clothespin Fever. Her critical work has appeared in such journals as NWSAJournal, Studies in American Jewish Literature, Utopian Studies, Monthly Review, Review of Radical Political Economics, Extrapolation, Science Fiction Studies, Foundation, Women in Judaism, Biography, Frontiers, and Studies in Progressive Judaism as well as Peace Review. She has also published fiction and poetry in venues such as Home Planet News, Spectrum, Key West Review, Feminist Review, Town Crier, Big Fish, and ThoughtCrime. 

She is the mother of one, lives with two cars, and is working on an eight act play titled Waiting for Justice.She has been presenting professionally on painting from the Divine Feminine, performance art, happenings, and  teaching feminism online. Her paper on the creation of new scholars by the use of journals in freshman composition hybrid classes appeared in the Journal of Scholarly Publishing. She sells her own art online at jewelryofthegoddess.info and  reclamationproject.info, Proceeds help to support the functioning of the journal. Her art is in numerous galleries and stores, including in Ohio, Virginia, VT, and at the American Visionary Arts Museum in Baltimore. She has written and published extensively about the sf writer Lelsie F. Stone, Star Trek, and  women activists in political movements in Palestine/Israel.

Contact info:

E-mail – batyawein@aol.com

Robin Ann Reid, Founding Co-Editor

Dr. Robin Anne Reid received her doctorate in English at the University of Washington in 1992. She also has a master's in creative writing, and a second master's (from the Bread Loaf School of Literature) in English. She is a professor of Literature and Languages at Texas A&M Univeristy-Commerce.

Her areas of teaching are creative writing, critical theory (critical race feminism, gender/queer theories, and sociolinguistics), and new media, specifically fan studies. Her publications include poetry, critical theory introductions to Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury, and she is the editor of the first encyclopedia on Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy. (Greenwood 2008). Her essays have appeared in Style, Extrapolation, Tolkien Studies, English Language Notes as well as in a number of anthologies. She is currently working on two book-length projects, one of which queers Harold Bloom to analyze slash elements in fan and original fiction, and another on race and racism imbroglios in online media fandom.

Contact info:
E-mail – Robin_Reid@tamu-commerce.edu

Ritch Calvin, Past Associate Editor

Ritch Calvin is an Assistant Professor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Women's and Gender Studies at SUNY Stony Brook. He is currently the Vice President of the Science Fiction Research Association and the media reviews editor for the SFRA Review. His work has appeared in Femspec, SFRA Review, Extrapolation, Science Fiction Studies, the New York Review of Science Fiction, the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, and Utopian Studies.

Suzy Charnas, Advisory Board

Born in Manhattan, New York, Suzy McKee Charnas was educated at Barnard College and New York University. She served in the Peace Corps 1961-62, got her MAT upon returning home, and taught high school until moving to New Mexico with her husband and turning to writing full-time. Her work includes Science Fiction, Y-A fantasy, mainstream fiction, and non-fiction books and stories, and a stage play based on her novel The Vampire Tapestry, a cult-classic. She was awarded the Nebula Award, Mythopoetic Society Award for a best children's book, and a Gilgamesh Award for best fantasy story. Her short story Boobs won the Hugo Award for best short SF in 1989. Her books include: Walk to the End of the World (Ballantine 1974), Motherlines (Berkeley, 1978), The Conqueror's Child (Tor 1999), The Furies (Tor Books 1994), which together make up a futurist, feminist epic, currently available from Tor Books; the complete series won the Tiptree Literary Award; Dorothea Dreams (Arbor House 1986), reissued by Aqueduct Press in 2010; and a Y-A trilogy soon to be available online. She is currently working on two new books, and on making older, OOP works available again in electronic format.

Contact info:
Website — www.suzymckeecharnas.com

Diane DiPrima, Advisory Board

Diane DiPrima is a poet and author who resides in San Francisco. She is one of the original writers from the Beat Generation, and is an author of many books, such as Revolutionary Letters, Pieces of a Song, and Memoirs of a Beatnik. She has a popular workshop titled “Word and Image” where she teaches how to combine the written word with a painted or photographic image. In 1993, she received an Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry from the National Poetry Association (refer to: http://dianediprima.com/bio.html). In 1999, St. Lawrence University awarded her with an honorary Doctor of Literature degree. She was the founder of The Poets Press and Eidolon Editions, two publishing houses that “focused on the writing of innovative and avante-garde poets” (refer to: http://www.rooknet.net). She wrote an autobiographical memoir called Recollections of My Life as a Woman, which was published in 2001 by Viking. Femspec's Batya Weinbaum wrote a review of the memoir for the Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering. Some of Diane DiPrima's books can be found on Amazon.com.

Contact info:
E-mail – ddiprima@earthlink.net

Pamela Sargent, Advisory Board

Pamela Sargent has won the Nebula Award, the Locus Award, and has been a finalist for the Hugo Award. She is the author of several highly praised novels, among them Cloned Lives (1976), The Sudden Star (1979), The Golden Space (1982), The Alien Upstairs (1983), and Alien Child (1988). Watchstar (1980), Eye of the Comet (1984), and Homesmind (1984) comprise a trilogy. The Shore of Women (1986), one of Sargent’s best-known books, was praised as “a compelling and emotionally involving novel” by Publishers Weekly. The Washington Post Book World has called her “one of the genre's best writers.”

Gregory Benford described her novel Venus of Dreams (1986) as "one of the peaks of recent science fiction." Venus of Shadows (1988), the sequel, was called "alive with humanity, moving, and memorable" by Locus. Child of Venus, the third book in this trilogy, was described as “masterful” by Publishers Weekly.

Sargent is also the author of Ruler of the Sky (1993), an epic historical novel about Genghis Khan. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of Reindeer Moon, commented about this novel: "Scholarly without ever seeming pedantic, the book is fascinating from cover to cover and does admirable justice to a man who might very well be called history’s single most important character." Sargent's Climb the Wind : A Novel of Another America was published by HarperPrism in 1999 and was a finalist for the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. Among her edited anthologies are Bio-Futures (1976), Afterlives (with Ian Watson, 1986), Women of Wonder (1975), More Women of Wonder (1976), The New Women of Wonder (1978), Women of Wonder:The Classic Years (1995), and Women of Wonder: The Contemporary Years (1995).
Sargent’s novel Earthseed was reissued by Tor in 2007, along with a sequel, Farseed. The third novel in this trilogy, Seed Seeker, has a publication date of November 2010.

Contact info:
Website – www.pamelasargent.com
E-mail –pamsargent@gmail.com

Gloria Orenstein, Advisory Board

Gloria Orenstein is Professor Emerita of  Comparative Literature and Gender Studies, University of Southern California. Professor Orenstein researches women's studies in contemporary art, literature and culture; and has written extensively on ecofeminism in the arts; surrealism; women and surrealism; shamanism and Jewish women artists. Her first book, The Theater of the Marvelous: Surrealism and The Contemporary Stage, paved the way for her pioneering work on the women of surrealism. She has also written extensively on The Women of Surrealism with her recent article in the book "In Wonderland" that accompanied the exhibition "In Wonderland" that opened at LACMA in 2012. She has written The Reflowering of the Goddess, a feminist analysis of the movement in the contemporary arts that reclaims the Goddess as a symbol of a paradigm shift and a change in our mythos and ethos. She has co-edited "Reweaving The World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism".  In the seventies she co-created The Woman's Salon for Literature in NYC, and created a feminist salon in Paris called Le Lieu Dit from 1978-79. In 1987, she co-created an Ecofeminist conference at USC, and became the student of The Shaman of Smiland for a few years. She has written briefly on Shamanism. Professor Orenstein also continues to pursue her interests in the avant-garde and feminist arts and literature.

Marleen S. Barr, Contributing Editor

Marleen S. Barr is known for her pioneering work in feminist science fiction and teaches English at the City University of New York. She has won the Science Fiction Research Association Pilgrim Award for lifetime achievement in science fiction criticism. Barr is the author of Alien to Femininity: Speculative Fiction and Feminist Theory, Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond, Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction, Genre Fission: A New Discouse Practice for Cultural Studies, anOy Pioneer!: A Novel. Barr has edited many anthologies and co-edited the special science fiction issue of PMLA, the journal of the Modern Language Association of America.

Contact info:
E-mail – barrm@hotmail.com

Samuel R. Delany, Contributing Editor

Samuel Delany, born in New York, attended the City College in New York, 1960, and 1962-63. As a writer, he won the Nebula and Hugo Awards. Samuel Delany is also a noted author of scripts, a director, and an editor for two short films. His best novel is Babel-17, a winner of the Science Fiction Writers of America Award in 1966. Samuel Delany has also earned the notation as the innovative and imaginative science fiction writer of today. He currently teaches Queer Studies at Temple University. His other books include The Bridge of Lost Desire (Arbor House 1987), Dhalgren (University Press of New England 1996), Atlantis: Three Tales (Wesleyan University Press 1995), The Star Pits (Tor Books 1989), and Equinox (Masquerade 1994).

Darko Suvin, Contributing Editor

Darko Suvin was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at McGill University in Montreal until he retired. He serves Femspec as a Contributing Editor and a noted author. His books include the ground breaking Russian Science Fiction 1956-1974 (1976), Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979, translated into six languages), Victorian Science Fiction in the UK: The Discourses of Knowledge and Power (1983), Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction (1988), and 13 other books on Brecht and drama or political epistemology; the latest one is Defined by a Hollow (2010)). In 1973-81 he also edited Science-Fiction Studies.

Contact info:
E-mail – darko.suvin@alice.it

William Clemente, Editorial Board

Since 1992, Bill Clemente has taught at Peru State College in southeastern Nebraska, where he is a Professor and Chair of English. His teaching schedule includes a variety of courses, including Non-Western Literature, Film Studies, Creative Writing, and World Literature. A few years ago, he introduced a composition course that focuses on Science Fiction, which he tries to teach once a year.  Director of the college's Honors Program, he also offers a course on Asian Literature.  A reader of sf for nearly forty years, Bill has been a fan and a student of Feminist sf for the past decade and some change.  He was also a judge for the James Tiptree Award, which honors gender-bending Speculative Fiction. His publications in that area include essays on James Tiptree, Jr. and Suzy Charnas. Bill and his wife, Linda, are also the authors of a biography of one of Canada's premier authors: Gabrielle Roy: Creation and Memory. In addition, Bill is an avid bird watcher and the editor of The Nebraska Bird Review.

Kathe Davis, Editorial Board

Kathe Davis is Director of Women's Studies at Kent State University in Ohio, where she teaches women's writing, contemporary poetry and gender issues. She has published on early science fiction, popular film, Ursula Le Guin and Doris Lessing, Adrienne Rich, Randall Jarrell, Robert Bly, and most copiously, on John Berryman.

Besides the topics above, she has presented papers on Rita Dove, Louise Bogan, Jane Cooper, Ani di Franco, Elizabeth Bishop, Hitler, masculinity studies, addiction, Stephen King, feminist sword and sorcery, nexialism, and the 1995 UN Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, where she was a delegate at the NGO Forum.

She is on the editorial board of Extrapolation, and has guest-edited a special issue on Women and Science Fiction, as well as writing numerous reviews.

Her poems have appeared in Hurricane Alice (Providence), the collections Opening Doors and Great Lake Erie: Imagining an Inland Sea, and in such Cleveland-area little magazines as Art Crimes, The Coventry Reader, and The Time of Your Life. She is also included in A Gathering of Poets (1991), the anthology commemorating the May 4, 1970 shootings at Kent State. She lives in the woods of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park with her partner and two cats.

Sherry Ginn, Editorial Board

Dr. Sherry Ginn earned both her MA (1984) and PhD (1988) in General-Experimental Psychology from the University of South Carolina. She completed post-doctoral training at the East Carolina University School of Medicine and taught at East Carolina University for a number of years, during which time she completed graduate study in the Women’s Studies Program. Dr. Ginn taught at Wingate University from 1999 – 2006, serving as the Director of the Women’s Studies program while there. She currently teaches at Rowan-Cabarrus Community College. She is a member and/or officer of a number of professional organizations, including the International Society for the History of the Neurosciences (President, 2008-2009; Secretary, 2010-), the Popular Culture Association (Chair, Science Fiction and Fantasy Section, 2009-), the Whedon Studies Association, and the North Carolina Writers’ Network. 

She has published numerous research articles in the fields of neuroscience and psychology, but currently focuses her extracurricular work on the intersection of popular culture with psychology and neuroscience. Dr. Ginn’s book, entitled Our Space, Our Place: Women in the Worlds of Science Fiction Television, was published in 2005. Her book Power and Control in the Television Worlds of Joss Whedon was published by McFarland in 2012 as was a collection of essays co-edited with Michael G. Cornelius entitled The Sex is Out of this World: The Carnal Side of Science Fiction. An edited collection on the award-winning television series Farscape will be published by McFarland in 2013. She is currently editing collections on the television series Fringe for McFarland and Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse for Scarecrow Press. An essay entitled “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: Exploring Neuroscience, Nature and Nurture in the Novel and the Films” is in press with Elsevier for a collection examining Neurology and the Arts. 

Contact info:

E-mail – doctorginn@gmail.com

Joan Gordon, Editorial Board

Joan Gordon is an Associate Professor of English at Nassau Community College. She is an editor of Science Fiction Studies and has co-edited two volumes of scholarly essays for UPenn with Veronica Hollinger, Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture (1987) and Edging Into the Future: Science Fiction as Contemporary Cultural Transformation.

Veronica Hollinger, Editorial Board

Veronica Hollinger is Professor of Cultural Studies at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario. She is co-editor of the journal Science Fiction Studies and has published many articles on science fiction and speculative literature, especially queer, feminist, and postmodern fantastic fiction.

She has co-edited several scholarly collections: Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture (U of Pennsylvania P, 1997), Edging into the Future: Science Fiction and Contemporary Cultural Transformation (U of Pennsylvania P, 2002), and Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2008). With her colleagues at SFS, she is also co-editor of The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction (Wesleyan UP, 2010).

Contact info:
Website – http://www.trentu.ca/culturalstudies/faculty_hollinger
E-mail – vhollinger@trentu.ca

Sylvia Kelso, Editorial Board

Sylvia Kelso is currently an adjunct lecturer at James Cook University in Townsville, North
Queensland, Australia. She has taught English there since 1985 and is currently teaching a semester course in Creative Writing. She has published poetry, including a contribution to an Australian Women's Anthology, short stories, in Antipodes: A North American Journal of Australian and New Zealand Literature, and Australian and US anthologies, and five fantasy novels, with two more novels forthcoming. Two of her novels were finalists for best fantasy novel of the year in the Australian Aurealis genre fiction awards. Her critical essays have appeared in Science-Fiction Studies, Foundation, the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Para.Doxa: Studies in World Literature, and The New York Review of Science Fiction. She guest edited a volume of new work on Ursula K. Le Guin for Paradoxa in 2008, and a collection of her critical work, Three Observations and a Dialogue: Around and About SF was released in 2009. She is currently a consulting board member for Para.Doxa. She has a Ph.D. on the interaction of feminism with modern Gothic and science fiction, and an MA in Creative Writing.

Lynne Reed, Editorial Board

As an undergraduate at Tufts University, she studied in 16 different departments, reflecting her multidisciplinary mind. Graduating in 1978 with a BA in Drama, she focused primarily on theatrical lighting in NYC for many years, fast forwarding through Textile Design, Owner of a Multicultural Spiritual Bookstore, and Teaching in the NYC Public School System. Leaving the fast track, Lynne lived in intentional communities for 10 years, and is currently living in Vermont, living simply, with the time to edit, write, paint and contemplate.

Contact info:
E-mail – silverwitch@mac.com

Gina Wisker, Editorial Board

Gina Wisker is coordinator of Women's Studies at Anglia Polytechnic University in Cambridge, UK where she is also director of learning and teaching development and teaches English literature. Her publications range from postcolonial: Postcolonial and African and American Women's Writing: A Critical Introduction (Macmillan 2000), Insights into Black Women's Writing (Macmillan 1993), to horror and fantasy: It's My Party: Reading Twentieth Century Women's Writing (ed.1994), Fatal Attractions: Rescripting Romance in Contemporary Literature and Film (ed.Lynne Pearce 1998), and several essays on women's vampire fictions in, among others,The Companion to Gothic (ed. David Punter), and on Angela Carter, and she co-edits Spokes, a poetry magazine. She was brought up all over the world , re-visits and travels at every oppportunity and lives in Cambridge UK with her husband, two sons, and two small dogs. She edited the special women's horror issue of Femspec.

Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor, Editorial Board

Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor is an associate professor of Women’s Studies and English at Penn State University.  She is author/editor of four books, the most recent of which are Postmodern Utopias and Feminist Fictions (Cambridge UP, 2013), and The Scandal of Susan Sontag (co-edited with Barbara Ching; Columbia UP, 2009). She has published numerous articles on nineteenth and twentieth literature, and more recently on women’s utopian literature.  Her current project, a book entitled Regarding Climate Change, will analyze how climate change narratives in literature and art.  These artworks offer complex scenarios provoking reader/audiences into critical thinking about how climate change and ecological threat generally might affect how we live in the future(s).  Central to this study are epistemological and narratological issues related to transformative thinking (or the lack thereof), affective politics, and feminist movement.

Maria Velazquez Earley, Book Review and Interview Editor

Maria Velazquez Earley is a doctoral student at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research interests include constructions of race, class, gender, and sexuality in contemporary media, as well as community-building and technology. She has served on the board of Lifting Voices, a District of Columbia-based nonprofit that helped young people in DC discover the power of creative writing, and is on the editorial board of Femspec, an academic journal exploring feminist speculative fiction. She recently received the Winnemore Dissertation Fellowship from the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, and is presently a visiting scholar at University of Hawaii- Manoa. She has also received a fellowship from the Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity’s Interdisciplinary Scholars Program.

Maria’s poetry has been published in Expanded Horizons, Concise Delights, and Stone Telling. She has also contributed reviews to Femspec, Women in Judaism, and The Cascadia Subduction Zone, and articles to The Wiscon Chronicles V: Writing and Racial Identity and Wiscon Chronicles 6. Maria has also earned a masters in Gender and Cultural Studies from Simmons College, and blogs for The Hathor Legacy (www.thehathorlegacy.com), a feminist pop culture blog. Her dissertation project examines the use of the body as a component in community building online, paying particular attention to the Bellydancers of Color Association, the anti-racist blogosphere, and Red Light Center, an adults’ only virtual world.