Karen Abbott was born and raised in Philadelphia, where she attended sixteen years of Catholic school—a tenure that gave her an appreciation for all things Magdalene and a finely tuned sense of guilt. Her first book, the New York Times bestseller Sin in the Second City, tells the true story of two sisters who ran the world’s most famous brothel. American Rose, her portrait of the legendary Gypsy Rose Lee, was published in January 2011 in honor of the ecdysiast’s 100th birthday. She often gives her job description as “Chronicler of Whores and Strippers” and feels as if she were born several generations too late.
Elisa Albert is the author of The Book of Dahlia, a novel, and How This Night Is Different, a collection of short stories. She believes reading good sex writing is liberating and that women have a lot of catching up to do in owning our sexuality and doesn’t think she needs to apologize for being a normal mammal. Elisa lives (and loves) with the brilliant and ruggedly handsome writer Edward Schwarzschild in Brooklyn and Albany, New York. Their baby son is likely to be utterly mortified by this book in about twelve years.
J. A. K. Andres is a writer, educator, and counselor. She holds a B.A. in history from Yale and an M.S. in school counseling from Johns Hopkins. She lives in Portland, Oregon, and currently juggles four screenplays, three children, two dogs, and one hunk of a man.
Susie Bright is a feminist sex critic and erotic educator. Author of bestselling books Full Exposure and The Sexual State of the Union, cofounder of On Our Backs, her new memoir is Big Sex Little Death (Seal Press). Visit her at www.susiebright.com.
Susan Cheever is the bestselling author of twelve books, including Louisa May Alcott: A Personal Biography, five novels, and two memoirs. As a bestselling novelist and biographer, who garnered critical and popular accolades for Home Before Dark, her account of her father, novelist John Cheever’s life, she appreciates intimately what it means to grow up immersed in the world of letters and under the implacable influence of an iconoclastic parent. And, of course, she knows well the challenges faced by a modern woman seeking fulfillment from and balance among the multiple facets of a complicated life. Her work has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the Boston Globe Winship Medal. She lives in New York City.
Gail Collins is an op-ed columnist for the New York Times. She has also served as the Times editorial page editor —the first woman ever to hold the post. She is the author of four books, including two histories of women in America. Ms. Collins began her journalistic career in Connecticut, where she founded the Connecticut State News Bureau (CSNB), which provided coverage of the state capitol to daily and weekly newspapers. When she sold it in 1977, the CSNB was the largest news service of its kind in the country, with more than thirty newspaper clients. She then moved to New York, where she worked at a number of news organizations and was a columnist for New York Newsday and the New York Daily News. Ms. Collins’s latest book, When Everything Changed, is a history of American women since 1960. She is also the author of America’s Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines; Scorpion Tongues, a history of gossip and American politics, and The Millennium Book, which she cowrote with her husband, Dan Collins. Ms. Collins grew up attending Catholic school, and in this piece she reflects on how human sexuality was (and wasn’t) introduced in the classroom.
Rosemary Daniell decided early in her writing life to break the two taboos with which she had been brought up as a southern woman—never to speak openly of anger or sexuality. Her beautiful, talented mother’s suicide had shown her where such repression led, and truth telling became Rosemary’s imperative, resulting in such controversial books as her first collection of poems, A Sexual Tour of the Deep South, and her memoirs, Fatal Flowers: On Sin, Sex, and Suicide in the Deep South and Sleeping with Soldiers: In Search of the Macho Man, both forerunners of the current memoir trend. Her most recent books are Secrets of the Zona Rosa: How Writing (and Sisterhood) Can Change Women’s Lives and Confessions of a (Female) Chauvinist; she is the author of three other books of poetry and prose. Among her awards are two National Endowment grants in Literature—one in poetry, another in fiction. Known as one of the best writing coaches in the country, Rosemary is also the founder of Zona Rosa, the series of writing-and-living workshops for women she leads throughout the country and in Europe. She is profiled in the book Feminists Who Changed America, 1963–1975; in 2008, she received a Governor’s Award in the Humanities for her impact on the state of Georgia.
Eve Ensler is a playwright, performer, and activist. She is the award-winning author of The Vagina Monologues, which has been published in forty-eight languages and performed in over 140 countries. Eve’s other works include Necessary Targets, The Treatment, The Good Body, Insecure At Last: A Political Memoir, and I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World. Eve has written for the Washington Post, the Guardian, Glamour, Huffington Post, and O, the Oprah Magazine. She is the founder of V-Day, the global activist movement to end violence against women and girls, which has raised over $80 million for grassroots groups working to end violence against women and girls. Eve was named one of US News & World Report’s “Best Leaders” in association with the Center for Public Leadership (CPL) at Harvard Kennedy School, and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Playwriting and an Obie Award.
Molly Jong-Fast wrote about her wild life as a girl in 1990s New York in a novel, Normal Girl, and a memoir, Girl [Maladjusted]. Her third book, The Social Climber’s Handbook, came out in April 2011 from Villard/Random House. She lives in New York City with her three children and two lizards, and her husband who does not like to be written about, at all, ever.
Susan Kinsolving is a poet and the recipient of four international fellowships, which were frustratingly awarded without a fine foreign fellow. Her books are: The White Eyelash, Among Flowers, Dailies & Rushes, a finalist for The National Book Critics Circle Award, and forthcoming My Glass Eye. (Forthcoming is not a pun.) Kinsolving teaches poetry and prudery in The Bennington Writing Seminars.
Julie Klam is the author of a memoir, Please Excuse My Daughter, and the New York Times bestseller You Had Me at Woof: How Dogs Taught Me the Secrets of Happiness. She writes for O, the Oprah Magazine, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, and the New York Times Magazine. She lives in New York City with her husband, her daughter, too many dogs, and a lot of turtlenecks.
Jean Hanff Korelitz is a native New Yorker currently in exile in New Jersey. She is the author of four novels, including Admission and The White Rose, a novel for children and a collection of poems, and a contributor to many magazines, including Vogue and More.
After Min Jin Lee’s husband, Christopher, recovered from the shock that she would not be writing about him (alone) for this compelling volume about sex, she decided that it might be safe to contribute an essay after all, since her mother and father would likely never learn about it. It also occurred to her that one day her son, Sam, might think she was far more interesting (read cooler) than she appeared. Lee is the author of the novel Free Food for Millionaires, which was a number one Book Sense Pick, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a Wall Street Journal Juggle Book Club selection, and a national bestseller. It was a “Top Ten Novels of the Year” for the Times of London, NPR’S Fresh Air, and USA Today. Her essays have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Travel + Leisure, Food & Wine, Vogue, Condé Nast Traveler, and the Times of London. She was a columnist for the Chosun Ilbo. Lee lives in Tokyo with her husband and son.
Ariel Levy is a staff writer at the New Yorker magazine, where she writes frequently about sexuality and gender. She has profiled the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, the intersex South African runner Caster Semenya, and the lesbian separatist Lamar Van Dyke. Levy is also the author of Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Essays and The Best American Crime Reporting.
Margot Magowan has been trying to save the world since she was nine years old when a random woman in San Francisco offered her a picket sign and some free candy. Margot grew up to cofound the Woodhull Institute, an organization that trains women leaders and change makers. Today Margot can be found blogging or speaking about issues that affect women. She’s appeared on TV and radio programs including CNN, Good Morning America, Fox News, and MSNBC; her articles have been in Glamour, Salon, the San Jose Mercury News, and other newspapers; her blog, ReelGirl, rates media and products on girl empowerment. Now, living with her husband and three small kids, Margot would be perfectly happy to stop arguing with everyone about everything and only write fiction.
Marisa Acocella Marchetto is a cartoonista/activista and the author of the graphic memoir Cancer Vixen (Knopf), which she is adapting into a movie starring Cate Blanchett. She is a contributor to the New Yorker, and has been published in the New York Times, Glamour, Elle, Bon Appétit, Harper’s Bazaar, O, the Oprah Magazine, ESPN Magazine, and the Observer (UK). As an activista, she has helped raise over a million dollars for the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and has raised a half million dollars for the Cancer Vixen Fund, which funds free breast screenings for women who are uninsured. Presently Marisa is finishing her graphic novel and is chained to her drawing board.
Daphne Merkin is a cultural critic who has made a name for herself with her often unnerving candor and elegantly High/Low reflections on issues of family, religion, depression, psychotherapy, and sex. She is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and was previously a staff writer for the New Yorker for five years. She has also contributed to a wide variety of other publications, including the New York Times Book Review, Vogue, Elle, Travel & Leisure, Allure, Slate, the Daily Beast, and Bookforum. She has taught courses on the art of reading and creative nonfiction at the 92nd Street Y and Marymount College. Ms. Merkin is the author of two books: an autobiographical novel, Enchantment, and Dreaming of Hitler, a collection of essays. She is currently at work on a memoir about chronic depression, tentatively titled The Black Season. She lives in New York City with her daughter.
Honor Moore’s poetry collections are Red Shoes, Darling, and Memoir, and she is the author of The Bishop’s Daughter, a memoir, and The White Blackbird, a life of her grandmother, the painter Margarett Sargent—both now available in paperback.
Meghan O’Rourke is the author of The Long Goodbye, a memoir about grief; and the poetry collections Halflife (W. W. Norton), which was a finalist for the Forward First Book Prize, and Once, forthcoming in 2011. A culture critic for Slate, she has published essays and poetry in the New Yorker, the Nation, Poetry, and elsewhere, and has written frequently about the cultural anxiety surrounding women’s sexual freedom.
Anne Roiphe has written eighteen books and enough articles to sink a small life raft. Now in her seventies, she is coming to the end of the story, which her children and grandchildren will continue. Body to body they were made and body to body they will make others in their image and she can’t think of a finer way to pass our time on earth.
Linda Gray Sexton is the author of the memoir Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide, published by Counterpoint Press, as well as four novels. Her first critically acclaimed memoir, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton, will be reissued by Couterpoint in April 2011. She lives in California with her husband, her two sons, and her dalmatian, Breeze.
Liz Smith calls herself “the two-thousand-year-old gossip columnist.” Arriving in Manhattan from the University of Texas journalism school in 1949, she has worked in celebrity/showbiz for fifty-seven years. She has written for seven different New York City newspapers and for almost every magazine. She was a CBS radio producer for Mike Wallace, then an NBC-TV producer in the fifties. Later, she went on camera at NBC and won an Emmy for reporting from the battleship Intrepid on the fortieth anniversary of World War II. In her bestselling memoir Natural Blonde, she wrote about being a war bride.
She appears on Fox News and in seventy newspapers. She has become a voice of reason and common sense, observing popular culture. Her philanthropy is legend—raising millions for AIDS research, Literacy Partners, New York Restoration Project, the Police Athletic League, the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York, and the New York Landmarks Conservancy. (They made her a “Living Landmark” in 1996.)
Liz is amused when dubbed “too nice.” Says she, “If this is true, why did Frank Sinatra denounce me on world stages? Why did Donald Trump try to buy my newspaper so he could fire me? Why did P.R. flack Bobby Zarem say I’d had a woman killed? Why did Sean Connery want to stick my column where the sun don’t shine? Why did Sean Penn run out of a building when we were introduced?”
Jann Turner is a writer and filmmaker. She is the author of the novels Heartland and Southern Cross, and the children’s book Home Is Where You Find It. She’s an award-winning filmmaker who has written and directed hundreds of hours of television, and she is the director of the feature films White Wedding and Paradise Stop.
Barbara Victor is a journalist who has covered the Middle East for most of her career. Based in Paris, she has worked for a variety of international magazines, newspapers, and television programs. She scored the first interview of Muammar Gaddafi after the November 1986 American bombardment of Libya and her interview was a cover story for US News & World Report. She is also the author of five novels, which have been translated into more than twenty-five languages, and nine nonfiction books, one of which, a biography of Hanan Ashrawi, was nominated for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize.
After living in Paris for twenty-two years, Barbara finally came home and married the man of her dreams. She lives in New York with her husband and three dogs, but still writes books, lectures on women’s issues, and writes a blog entitled Mecca (see barbaravictor.com).
Rebecca Walker is the author of the bestselling, award-winning memoirs Black, White, and Jewish and Baby Love; and editor of the anthologies To Be Real, What Makes a Man, and One Big Happy Family. She parents avidly, writes constantly, lectures widely, and teaches seminars on creative nonfiction and the art of memoir around the world.
Jennifer Weiner was born in 1970 on an army base in Louisiana. She grew up in Connecticut, graduated with a degree in English literature from Princeton University, and worked as a newspaper reporter until the publication of her first book. She is the author of the novels Good in Bed; In Her Shoes, which was turned into a major motion picture; Little Earthquakes; Goodnight Nobody; the short story collection The Guy Not Taken; Certain Girls, the sequel to Good in Bed; Best Friends Forever; and Fly Away Home. There are more than eleven million copies of her books in print in thirty-six countries. She can be found on Facebook, on Twitter, and, in real life, in Philadelphia, where she lives with her family.
Fay Weldon has been writing novels, stories, stage and screen plays for a good forty years and shows no sign of stopping. In Britain she is known as a national treasure, which she supposes to be better than being a national disgrace. She has been married three times and has four sons, three stepsons and one stepdaughter.
Jessica Winter is a senior editor at TIME. Her writing has appeared in Slate, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Believer, and many other publications. She lives in Brooklyn.