Speaker Bios

Keynote speaker: Ursula K. Le Guin

Ursula Kroeber was born in 1929 in Berkeley, California. Her parents were the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber and the writer Theodora Kroeber, author of Ishi. She graduated from Radcliffe College and studied at Columbia University. She married Charles A. Le Guin, a historian, in Paris in 1953. They have lived in Portland, Oregon, since 1958, and they have three children and four grandchildren.

Ursula K. Le Guin writes both poetry and prose, and in various genres including realistic fiction, science fiction, fantasy, young children’s books, books for young adults, screenplays, essays, verbal texts for musicians, and voicetexts for performance or recording. She has published six books of poetry, twenty novels, over a hundred short stories (collected in eleven volumes), four collections of essays, eleven books for children, and four volumes of translation. Few American writers have done work of such high quality in such a staggering variety of forms.

Most of Le Guin’s major titles have remained continuously in print, some for over forty years. Her best known fantasy works, the first four Books of Earthsea, have sold millions of copies in America and England, and have been translated into sixteen languages. Her first major work of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness, is considered epoch-making for its radical investigation of gender roles and its moral and literary complexity. Her novels The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home redefine the scope and style of utopian fiction, while the realistic stories of a small Oregon beach town in Searoad show her permanent sympathy with the ordinary griefs of ordinary people. Among her books for children, the Catwings series has become a particular favorite. Her version of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, a translation she worked on for forty years, has received high praise.

Three of Le Guin’s books have been finalists for the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and her writings have also received a National Book Award, five Hugo Awards, five Nebula Awards, SFWA’s Grand Master, the Kafka Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Howard Vursell Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the L.A. Times Robert Kirsch Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, and the Margaret A. Edwards Award.

Le Guin has taken the risk of writing seriously and with rigorous artistic control in genres some consider subliterary. Her courage has been generously rewarded: Harold Bloom includes her among his list of classic American writers, and Grace Paley, Carolyn Kizer, Gary Snyder, and John Updike have also praised her work. Many critical and academic studies of Le Guin’s work have been undertaken, including books by Elisabeth Cummins, James Bittner, B.J. Bucknall, J. De Bolt, B. Selinger, K.R. Wayne, D.R. White, an early bibliography by Elizabeth Cummins Cogell, and a continuation of the bibliography by David S. Bratman.

Le Guin leads an intensely private life, with sporadic forays into political activism and steady participation in her local literary community, particularly Oregon Public Library, Oregon Literary Arts, and the Soapstone Foundation. She limits her public appearances mostly to the West Coast. Having taught writing workshops from Vermont to Australia, she is now retired from teaching. The annual workshop Flight of the Mind provided the impetus for a book on writing narrative, Steering the Craft (Eighth Mountain, 1998).

Recent publications include The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Reader, the Writer, and the Imagination (Shambhala, February 2004); Incredible Good Fortune: New Poems (Shambhala 2006); and The Annals of the Western Shore: Gifts, (Harcourt 2004, paperback edition 2006); Voices (Harcourt, September 2006), and Powers, (Harcourt, September 2007).

Selected Writings

• Finding my Elegy (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012)
• Lavinia (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008)
• Powers (Harcourt, 2007)
• The Telling (Harcourt, 2000)
• Steering the Craft: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone (Eighth Mountain Press, 1998)
• Searoad: Chronicles of Klatsand (HarperCollins, 1991)
• Always Coming Home (Harper, 1985)
• The Compass Rose (short stories) (Harper, 1982)
• The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (Harper, 1974)
• The Left Hand of Darkness (Ace Books, 1969)
• A Wizard of Earthsea (Houghton Mifflin, 1968)
• Catwings series (for children)

Selected Awards

• 2001 Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame
• 1976 Jupiter Award for “The Diary of the Rose”
• 1975 Hugo Award for The Dispossessed
• 1974 Jupiter Award for The Dispossessed
• 1974 Nebula Award for The Dispossessed
• 1974 Jupiter Award for “The Day Before the Revolution”
• 1974 Nebula Award for “The Day Before the Revolution”
• 1975 Hugo Award for “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
• 1973 National Book Award for Children’s Literature for The Farthest Shore
• 1973 Hugo Award for “The Word for World is Forest”
• 1972 Newberry Silver Medal Award for The Tombs of Atuan
• 1970 Hugo Award for The Left Hand of Darkness
• 1969 Nebula Award for The Left Hand of Darkness
• 1969 Boston Globe Horn Book Award for A Wizard of Earthsea
• 1953 Fulbright Fellowship

40^th Anniversary Celebration Speakers (in alphabetical order)

[column width=”2%” padding=”0%”]
[/column] [column width=”46%” padding=”2%”]
Yvette Alex-Assensoh

In August of 2012, Dr. Yvette M. Alex-Assensoh joined the University of Oregon as Vice President for Equity and Inclusion, with the responsibility for collaboratively leading the University of Oregon’s efforts to embed inclusion, equity and diversity in its institutional practices, policies, and norms. Her portfolio reaches broadly across many aspects of campus life, supporting the academic mission of the institution to ensure that students, faculty and staff from all backgrounds have an equal opportunity to access, as well as to thrive and, ultimately, to succeed at the University. Prior to joining the University of Oregon in her current position, Yvette served as a tenured Professor of Political Science and a Dean at Indiana University in Bloomington. While there, she won outstanding research awards, secured national funding for her research projects, served as a Fulbright Scholar at University of Zagreb in Croatia and also led national committees focusing on issues of equity, diversity, teaching excellence and ethics. She is the author/co-author of five books, dozens of scholarly essays and numerous journalistic/trade essays. She is a consultant on diversity/gender issues. Yvette, who is a trained lawyer and registered mediator, is a member of the Indiana and Oregon Bar Associations. Yvette and her husband (Indiana University History Professor Emeritus A.B. Assensoh) are parents of two teen-age sons.

 

Kate Barkley

Kate Barkley currently resides in Eugene where she actively serves on Lane County’s Human Service Community Action Advisory Committee. Barkley received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Oregon in 1996 where her research was focused on Gender and Research Methods. After teaching at the University of Puget Sound, she returned to Eugene and became Executive Director of Womenspace, an organization which prevents domestic violence while empowering and supporting survivors of domestic violence. Barkley volunteered with Womenspace in the early 1980s and 1990s and in her early work with Womenspace, she was responsible for developing some of the earliest community outreach and educational materials while also contributing to the research of the ‘her’story of the organization. Barkley remains active in aiding the impoverished and homeless community of Eugene.

 

Shannon Elizabeth Bell


Shannon Elizabeth Bell is an assistant professor of Sociology at the University of Kentucky and is also affiliated faculty in the Environmental & Sustainability Studies Program, the Gender & Women’s Studies Department, and the Appalachian Studies Program. Her research falls at the intersection of environmental sociology, gender, and social movements. The primary focus of Dr. Bell’s research is understanding the ways in which environmentally-destructive industries acquire, maintain, and exercise their power and discovering strategies for increasing the political participation of local citizens who are most affected by environmental injustices. In 2013 Dr. Bell won the Practice and Outreach Award from the Environment & Technology Section of the American Sociological Association. She is also the recipient of the Robert Boguslaw Award for Technology and Humanism (2013), the University of Kentucky College of Arts & Sciences Outstanding Teaching Award (2013), the Best Article Award from the Rural Sociological Society (2011), and her dissertation received Honorable Mention for the Council of Graduate Schools/ProQuest International Distinguished Dissertation Award in the Social Sciences for dissertations completed between 2010-2012. Dr. Bell’s first book, Our Roots Run Deep as Ironweed: Appalachian Women and the Fight for Environmental Justice, was recently published with University of Illinois Press.

 

Yvonne Braun

Yvonne A. Braun is an associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and graduate director of International Studies at the University of Oregon. Her research interests include social inequalities and change, environmental justice, intersectionality, African studies, social movements, and development and globalization. She has published more than two dozen articles and chapters and is co-editor of the volume Women’s Encounters with Globalization from Frontpage Publications. Her 2011 article “Left High and Dry: An Intersectional Analysis of Gender, Dams, and Development in Lesotho” won the Inaugural Enloe Award of the International Feminist Journal of Politics. Currently she is Chair of the Global Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP).

 

R. Charli Carpenter

R. Charli Carpenter is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Her teaching and research interests include national security ethics, the laws of war, agenda-setting in transnational advocacy networks, gender and political violence, humanitarian affairs and the role of information technology in human security. She has a particular interest in the gap between intentions and outcomes among advocates of human security. She has published three books and numerous journal articles and has served as a consultant for the United Nations. During her graduate work at University of Oregon, her research as was first supported by grants from the Center for the Study of Women in Society.

 

Suzy McKee Charnas

Suzy McKee Charnas was born and educated in New York City, attending Barnard College as an Economic History major (1961) and, after a two-year stint in Nigeria with the Peace Corps, New York University (MAT, 1965). She taught at the New Lincoln School in New York until Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital hired her away as a curriculum consultant for their high school drug-abuse treatment program. In 1969 she married and moved to New Mexico, where she began writing fiction full-time. She is the author of over a dozen works of science fiction, fantasy, and horror, including the Holdfast series from Tor Books and the Sorcery Hall series of books for young adults. Her first novel, Walk To The End Of The World (1974), was a John W. Campbell Award finalist. Her science fiction and fantasy books and stories published since then have won her the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, the Mythopoeic Society’s Award for young-adult fantasy, and the James Tiptree Jr. Literary Award.

 

Scott Coltrane

Scott Coltrane became Interim Senior Vice President and Provost on July 1, 2013. As Interim Provost, he serves as the chief academic officer at the University of Oregon, fostering excellence in undergraduate education, graduate education, research, and service to Oregonians. He previously served as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon (2008-2013) and as Associate Dean of the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at the University of California, Riverside (2004-2008). Coltrane received a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1988 and was a professor of Sociology at the University of California Riverside from 1988 to 2008.  His research focuses on families, with special attention given to the ways that mothers and fathers divide parenting and housework. He is the author of four books and more than 100 articles and chapters.  Coltrane received the Distinguished Teaching Award at UC Riverside, is past President of the Pacific Sociological Association, and is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

 

Sonia De La Cruz

Sonia De La Cruz was raised in the Mexican city of Guadalajara were she worked producing television programs and coordinating statewide cultural and art festivals in the state of Jalisco. After arriving to the United States, her circuitous path took her around the country working as a labor organizer and social activist, as well as being involved in socio-cultural endeavors with the Latino advisory committee to the Oakland Museum of California. She is also a documentary filmmaker who has directed and produced a number of documentaries related to human rights and social justice issues in the U.S. and internationally. Currently, she is a doctoral candidate in the Communication and Society program at the University of Oregon and a graduate fellow for the Oregon Latino Heritage Collaborative. Her research interests include international communication, development communication, diasporic cultures and social change. Her dissertation examines how Latino diasporas use media space in their everyday lives to construct or renew identity and build community across borders.

 

Grace Dillon

Grace L. Dillon (Anishinaabe) is an Associate Professor in the Indigenous Nations Studies Program and Affiliated faculty in English at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on a range of interests including First Nations Peoples and Indigenous studies, Indigenous Futurisms, science fiction and speculative literature, Indigenous cinema, Indigenous New Media, popular culture/cultural studies, cultural and environmental sustainability, gender, race and nation-building social justice, and early modern literature. She is the editor of Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (University of Arizona Press, 2012) and Hive of Dreams: Contemporary Science Fiction from the Pacific Northwest (Oregon State University Press, 2003). Her work appears in diverse science fiction book collections such as Orbiting Ray Bradbury’s Mars (2013), the upcoming Black Planets, Brown Planets (in 2014), and a collection of Stephen Graham Jones’s works with the University of New Mexico Press (in 2014), and journals including The Journal of Science Fiction Film and Television; Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction; Extrapolation; The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts; The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television; Science Fiction Studies; and Renaissance Papers. Currently, writing Seeding the Stars, a monograph on Indigenous Futurisms is the latest love project.

 

L Timmel Duchamp

L. Timmel Duchamp is the author of the five-novel Marq’ssan Cycle and Love’s Body, Dancing in Time and Never at Home, collections of short fiction, as well as the short novel The Red Rose Rages (Bleeding) and dozens of short stories that have been published in magazines and anthologies like Asimov’s SF and the Full Spectrum and Leviathan series. Her fiction has been a finalist for the Nebula and Sturgeon Awards and short-listed numerous times for the James Tiptree Jr. Literary Award. Her essays and reviews have been published in numerous venues, including The American Book Review, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Extrapolation, Foundation, Science Fiction Film and Television, and Strange Horizons. She is also the founder and publisher of Aqueduct Press and the editor of Narrative Power: Encounters, Celebrations, Struggles; Missing Links and Secret Histories: A Selection of Wikipedia Entries Lost, Suppressed, or Misplaced in Time; Talking Back: Epistolary Fantasies; and The WisCon Chronicles, Vol.1 , and co-editor, with Eileen Gunn, of The WisCon Chronicles, Vol.2.

 

Judith Eisen

Judith Eisen is a professor of biology and former director of the Institute of Neuroscience at the University of Oregon. Her research focuses on mechanisms underlying early development of the nervous system, and she has published many papers and review articles in this area. In 2010, she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship to study interactions between the developing nervous system and the community of bacteria that live within the intestinal tract. The same year, she also received a Howard Hughes Medical Institute grant to help establish the University of Oregon Science Literacy Program (SLP), which she co-directs. The goal of the SLP is to improve scientific awareness and science literacy by improving teaching of general education courses for undergraduate non-science majors, and to help educate the next generation of science teachers by providing mentored teaching experiences for science graduate students.

 

Marilyn Farwell

Marilyn Farwell is a transplanted Midwesterner who was raised in Wisconsin and in 1971 received her PH.D. in English Literature from the University of Illinois.  That same year the University of Oregon hired her as a Milton scholar, a specialty that soon faded in light of the academic feminist movement in the 1970s.  She then started teaching courses on women writers, and in 1974 she co-chaired the committee that founded Women’s Studies at Oregon.   In 1975, she was part of the small group that met with William Harris about funding for what eventually became the Center for the Study of Women in Society.  When the Center was formally established in 1983, she became one of its co-directors.  She is the author of several articles on women writers and of the book, Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives.  In 1999 she retired as Professor Emerita and currently pursues her passion for opera as a music reviewer for the Eugene Register Guard and her newly found interest in fly fishing.

 

Lynn Fujiwara

Lynn Fujiwara is head of the Department of Ethnic Studies and an associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies. She received her BA from the University of California, San Diego in 1990, her MA in 1993 and her PhD in 1999, both from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She joined the faculty at the University of Oregon in 2000. Her research interest include feminist theory, Third World and critical race feminisms, women of color, and issues of immigration, citizenship, welfare, labor, and family. Her most recent book is titled Mothers without Citizenship: Asian Immigrant Families and the Consequences of Welfare Reform, from University of Minnesota Press.

 

Molly Gloss

Molly Gloss is a fourth-generation Oregonian who lives in Portland. Her novel The Jump-Off Creek was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for American Fiction, and a winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award and the Oregon Book Award. In 1996 Molly was a recipient of a Whiting Writers Award. The Dazzle of Day was named a New York Times Notable Book and was awarded the PEN Center West Fiction Prize. Wild Life won the James Tiptree Jr. Award, an annual literary prize for works of science fiction or fantasy that expand or explore our understanding of gender, and was chosen as the 2002 selection for “If All Seattle Read the Same Book.” The Hearts of Horses, published in 2007, is the novel of a young woman breaking horses for several ranchers in Eastern Oregon in the winter of 1917.

 

Shelley Grosjean

Shelley Grosjean is earning a master’s degree in the Department of History at the University of Oregon.  She received her B.A. in History from the University of Oregon in 2011. In 2013 she received the Thomas Turner Memorial Prize for outstanding achievement by a History graduate student.  Her scholarly interests include women and gender in the 20th century US, with a focus on the social and cultural changes in regard to sexual and gender identity at mid century. She is currently working on a thesis concerning the centrality of female bodies to the built environment, spirituality, and sexuality in Oregon lesbian intentional communities during the 1970s and 1980s. Her work on Oregon’s lesbian intentional communities began as an undergraduate where she used archival materials to explore gendered work on Oregon lesbian intentional communities. This research, which she continues in her research today, was supported by the 2010 Jane Higdon Senior Thesis Scholarship from the Center for the Study of Women in Society.

 

Andrea Hairston

Andrea Hairston is author of Redwood and Wildfire, winner of the 2011 James Tiptree Jr. Award, and Mindscape, shortlisted for the Phillip K. Dick and Tiptree Awards and winner of the Carl Brandon Parallax Award. Both books were published by Aqueduct Press. Andrea is a performer, award-winning playwright, and the artistic director of Chrysalis Theatre. Her plays have been produced at Yale Rep, Rites and Reason, the Kennedy Center, StageWest, and on public radio and television. In her spare time she is the Louise Wolff Kahn 1931 Professor of Theatre and Afro-American Studies at Smith College. She has received the International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts Distinguished Scholarship Award for outstanding contributions to the criticism of the fantastic.

 

Margaret Hallock

Margaret Hallock has been active in economic and labor policy in Oregon since 1974. She is the founding director of the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics and was formerly the director of the University of Oregon’s Labor Education and Research Center and a member of the faculty in the Department of Economics. Dr. Hallock has extensive experience in labor relations and state policy matters. She was the chief economist for the Oregon Public Employees Union, Service Employees International Union 503. She was appointed to chair the state’s Pay Equity Task Force and led the successful pay equity campaign for state employees in the 1980s. Hallock served as senior policy adviser to Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski for 2003-04 and has been a member of numerous boards and commissions. She has published papers on tax reform, labor unions, women and the economy, and workforce education and training.

 

Michael Hames-García

Michael Hames-García is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at University of Oregon. He is the author of Identity Complex: Making the Case for Multiplicity (University of Minneapolis Press, 2011) and Fugitive Thought: Prison Movements, Race, and the Meaning of Justice (University of Minnesota Press, 2004). He also is the co-editor of Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader (Duke University Press, 2011), which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Anthology. His research interests include Chicana/o, U.S. Latina/o, and African American literatures and cultures; race and incarceration in the United States; gender and sexuality; and theories of identity and the self. Raised in Oregon, Hames-García received a Bachelor of Arts from Willamette University in 1993 and a PhD from Cornell University in 1998. After teaching at the State University of New York for 7 years, he returned to Oregon in 2005 to join Ethnic Studies at the UO, where he served as program chair and department head from 2006-2011.

 

Joan Haran

Currently a freelance scholar, from April 2004 until October 2013, Joan Haran was a Research Fellow with the ESRC funded Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (Cesagen) at Cardiff University. While there, she co-authored the research monograph Human Cloning in the Media: From Science Fiction to Science Practice (2008). She is currently completing a sole-authored book entitled Genomic Fictions: Genes, Gender and Genre, and co-editing a bilingual collection of short stories and critical essays on the theme of Gender and Science in Fiction with a Brazilian colleague, Dr. Ildney Cavalcanti. She has recently begun a new research project on critical and everyday utopias, with a geographical focus on California and Oregon, and a thematic focus on feminism, science/fiction, sustainability and social justice. In 2003, Haran received a PhD from Warwick University for her project ReVisioning Feminist Futures, which extended research on feminist science fiction that she began with her Master’s dissertation in 1994 at Birkbeck College, University of London.

 

Ellen Herman

Ellen Herman is a historian of the modern United States with special interests in the human sciences, social engineering, and therapeutic culture. Her most recent book is Kinship by Design: A History of Adoption in the Modern United States (University of Chicago Press, 2008). She is also the author of The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (University of California Press, 1995), and a contributor to a series for young readers on “Issues in Lesbian and Gay Life”: Psychiatry, Psychology, and Homosexuality (New York: Chelsea House, 1995). Professor Herman’s work has been supported by fellowships at Harvard Law School and Radcliffe’s Bunting Institute, as well as by a major research grant from the Science and Technology Studies Program of the National Science Foundation. She has explored the possibilities of digital public history with The Adoption History Project. Her new research project, “Autism, Between Risks and Rights” was supported in 2011-2012 by a Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.

Anita Johnson

One of three owners of Eugene Weekly, Anita Johnson acts as publisher of the alternative weekly newspaper in Eugene, Oregon. In 1992, she bought shares in the paper, then called What’s Happening, which was close to bankruptcy. She helped build the publication to a circulation of 40,000, and now Eugene Weekly one of the largest papers in Oregon. A 1952 graduate of the University of Oregon School of Journalism, she was editor of the Oregon Daily Emerald, assistant editor of Old Oregon alumni magazine, reporter for the UO news bureau, and stringer for the Portland Oregonian and the Oregon Journal. That experience, plus nine months working in an Idaho senator’s D.C. office, led to a reporting job on The Washington Post. But the classic choice of the time, career or family, brought her back to Oregon to marry Attorney Art Johnson and to raise four children in Eugene. In those years, she took small journalistic jobs at the University, such as writing radio speeches for President Arthur Flemming and putting together publications for student services, finally to be persuaded by President Paul Olum to serve as acting director of Affirmative Action for one year, a full-time position. After that chaotic year, it was easy to return to her career in print journalism at the Eugene Weekly, encouraged by two daughters, two sons, and her husband.

 

Shoshana Kerewsky

Shoshana D. Kerewsky is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Oregon in the Counseling Psychology and Human Services department. Kerewsky teaches in the Counseling Psychology doctoral program, the Couples and Family Therapy master’s program, and the Family and Human Services undergraduate program. She is also Academic Coordinator of the Substance Abuse Prevention Program. Her teaching interests include ethics, professional preparation, diversity, international service, and supervision. Dr. Kerewsky has served as president of Northwest Human Services Association, Lane County Psychologists’ Association and Oregon Psychological Association. She has chaired OPA’s Ethics Committee and co-chaired National Organization for Human Services’ Ethics Committee. She is editor of OPA’s newsletter, The Oregon Psychologist. A licensed psychologist, she received her B.A. in Linguistics and Psychology from Swarthmore College in 1983, her A.M. in Writing from Brown University in 1985, her M.A. in Counseling Psychology, Clinical Track from Lesley University in 1990 and her Psy.D. in Clinical Psychology from Antioch University New England in 1998. She is a licensed psychologist.

 

Cheris Kramarae

Cheris Kramarae is the author or co-author of 75 articles, and author, editor, or co-editor of 12 books dealing with women and education, scholarship, online education, and language—including the Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women: Global Women’s Issues and Knowledge.  In addition to her teaching and administrative work at the University of Illinois and the University of Oregon, she has served as an International Dean at the International Women’s University, Germany, 1999-2000, and has been a guest-teacher of women’s and gender studies classes in six other countries. She is a past director of the Center for the Study of Women in Society.

[/column][column width=”46%” padding=”2%”]
Larissa Lai

Larissa Lai is the author of two novels, When Fox Is a Thousand, shortlisted for the Books in Canada First Novel Award, and Salt Fish Girl, shortlisted for the James Tiptree Jr. Literary Award, the Sunburst Award, and the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Award; one book of poetry Automaton Biographies, shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Award; and a chapbook, Eggs in the Basement, shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award. Through the 1990s, she was a cultural organizer in feminist, GLBTQ, and anti-racist communities in Vancouver. Now, as an English professor at the University of British Columbia, she teaches courses on race, memory, the poetics of relation, and feminist speculative fiction.

 

Julia Lesage

Julia Lesage is a professor emerita in the Department of English at University of Oregon. Her publications include Making a Difference: University Students of Color Speak Out, with Abby Ferber, Deborah Storrs, and Donna Wong, (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); Media, Culture, and the Religious Right, ed. with Linda Kintz (University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Videotape Production: In Plain English, Making a Difference, El Cracero, Troubadours, Las Nicas (available from Facets Multimedia, Chicago). She is also co-founder and co-editor of Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media.

 

Alexis Lothian

Alexis Lothian is Assistant Professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, where she researches and teaches at the intersections of cultural studies, digital media, speculative fiction, and queer theory. Her research focuses on speculative fiction’s engagements with race, gender, and sexuality, and she also works on digital artistic forms that are emerging from science fiction fan communities, especially as these forms engage critical readings of media texts and are used to participate in social justice activism. She is the editor of the feminist science fiction special issue of Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, coeditor of a Social Text Periscope dossier on “Speculative Life,” and a founding member of the editorial team for the journal Transformative Works and Cultures. Her work has been published in International Journal of Cultural Studies, Cinema Journal, Camera Obscura, Extrapolation, and the Journal of Digital Humanities. She has been a participant in the feminist science fiction convention WisCon since 2008 and edited the sixth volume of Aqueduct Press’s WisCon Chronicles, on “Futures of Feminism and Fandom.” Alexis maintains an academic blog at queergeektheory.org and tweets as @alothian.

 

Nichole June Maher

Nichole June Maher joined Northwest Health Foundation as president and CEO in August 2012. Previously, she served as the executive director of the Native American Youth and Family Center (NAYA) in Portland, Oregon for over 11 years. Under her leadership, the NAYA Family Center grew from a staff of five and a budget of $200,000 to over 100 employees and a $10 million annual budget. In 2010, NAYA served over 5,000 families as a community service organization offering culturally specific education programs, a fully accredited high school, financial literacy and micro enterprise development, social services, domestic violence prevention and response programs, housing, and comprehensive poverty reduction programs. Born in Ketchikan, Alaska, Maher attended school on the Siletz Indian Reservation in Oregon and is a member of the Tlingit Tribe of Southeast Alaska. She holds a Masters in Public Health from the Mark Hatfield School of Government at Portland State University and two Bachelors of Science, one in Public Health and one in American Indian Studies from Oregon State University. In 1999, she completed a fellowship at Harvard Medical School, as well as the Robert Wood Johnson Minority Medical Education program at Yale Medical School in 1998. She has received numerous leadership and industry honors.

 

Marion Malcolm

As a kid playing in her New Jersey neighborhood, Marion Malcolm could be heard saying loudly and emphatically, “it’s not fair.” She hasn’t changed much since. Marion has been an organizer for social justice and peace for nearly 50 years, her entire adult life. From late 1974 through 1999, she served on the staff of Community Alliance of Lane County (CALC), and continued her involvement on a consultant basis for an additional dozen years. She enjoys being an instigator and has helped launch many programs and projects, including the Safe Schools Working Group, the Springfield Shelter Rights Alliance and the Egan Memorial Warming Center. She believes in creating partnerships and in connecting cultural and political work. Marion has a BA in Comparative Literature from Cornell University and an MA in South Asia Studies from UC Berkeley.

 

Gabriella Martínez

Gabriela Martínez is an international award-winning documentary maker who has produced, directed or edited more than twelve ethnographic and socio/political documentaries, including Textiles in the Southern Andes (1993), Qoyllur Rit’i: A Woman’s Journey (1998), Women, Media, and Rebellion in Oaxaca (2008), Latino Roots in Lane County (2009), and Keep Your Eyes On Guatemala (2013). In addition to her career as a documentary producer, Martínez is engage in research, focusing on international and global communications, media ownership, and media culture. Her creative and research work emphasizes Latin American issues and Latinos in the United States as a growing ethnic minority. She is the author of Latin American Telecommunications: Telefónica’s Conquest, Cinema Law in Latin America: Brazil, Peru, and Colombia, The Media Map Project: Peru a case study. Martínez is associate director of the Center for the Study of Women in Society and associate professor in the School of Journalism and Communication, University of Oregon.

 

Margaret McBride

Recently retired, Margaret McBride taught in the English and Writing Department at the University of Oregon beginning in 1981. For more than twenty years she taught at least one science fiction class a year, including three terms teaching Gender and Sexuality in Science Fiction and Fantasy, which focused on winners of the James Tiptree Jr. Award. In 2004, she chaired the award selection panel for the Tiptree Award, an annual literary prize for works of science fiction or fantasy that expand or explore our understanding of gender. She has presented papers and been on panels at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, the Science Fiction Research Association Conference, the feminist science fiction conference WisCon, Orycon, Potlatch, WesterCon and two World Cons.

 

Vonda N. McIntyre

Vonda N. McIntyre does not remember learning to read, but the first thing she remembers reading is a science fiction novel. She sold her first science fiction short story when she was twenty. Several more story sales followed, and the next year she attended the Clarion Writers Workshop at Clarion State College in Clarion, Pennsylvania, where her classmates included Octavia E. Butler and George Alec Effinger. After spending eighteen months in graduate school in genetics, she realized that as a research scientist she made a very good SF writer. She spent the next several years living four miles down a logging road, where she finished her first novel, The Exile Waiting, and wrote much of Dreamsnake. During the summers of 1971, 1972, and 1973, she organized the Clarion West Writers Workshop. During the 1972 workshop, in response to a writing exercise set by Avram Davidson, she wrote “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand.” One of her classmates responded by saying, “How dare you write a story that makes me feel sorry for a snake!” Analog Science Fiction and Fact published the story; it was nominated for the Hugo Award and won SFWA’s Nebula Award. “Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand” became the first chapter of Dreamsnake, which won the Hugo, the Nebula, the Locus, and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards. When the editor of the Pocket Books line of Star Trek novels discovered that she was a big fan of the original series, he invited her to write an original Star Trek novel. His reaction after reading The Entropy Effect was that Paramount would either love it or hate it. They loved it, so she also wrote Enterprise (the 20th anniversary Star Trek novel) and the novel versions of the Star Trek II, III, and IV movies. Other interests over the years have included showing hunters and jumpers, three-phase events, Aikido (she is a shodan), and various handcrafts; her work has been included in The Institute for Figuring’s Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef and in Science News Online. She is a founding member of Book View Café Publishing Cooperative, which publishes her backlist in ebook form. She has made her living as an sf writer for her entire adult life. Her other novels include The Starfarers Quartet (Starfarers, Transition, Metaphase, Nautilus), and The Moon and the Sun, which won the Nebula Award. She is honored to be one of the Guests of Honor at the 2015 Worldcon, Sasquan, in Spokane, Washington. The movie version of The Moon and the Sun is set to begin filming in Australia and France in early 2014, by Pandemonium Films. Starfarers, “the best sf miniseries never made,” has still never been made.

 

Sandra Morgen

Sandra Morgen is Vice Provost for Graduate Studies, Associate Dean of the Graduate School and a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. Her research focuses on gender, race, class and public policy in the U.S., specifically on health, social welfare and cultural politics of taxes. Her recent books are Stretched Thin: Poor Families, Welfare Work and Welfare Reform, Into Our Own Hands: The Women’s Health Movement in the U.S. 1969-1990, winner of the Eileen Basker Prize from the Society for Medical Anthropology, 2004 and co-author of Taxes are a Woman’s Issue. She is a co- editor of Work, Welfare and Politics and Rethinking Security: Gender, Race, and Militarization. She has received the Career Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Field of Anthropology of the U.S from the Society for the Anthropology of North America, the Squeaky Wheel Award for Dedication to Achieving Greater Gender Parity for Women in Anthropology from the American Anthropological Association, and the Martin Luther King and Charles Johnson awards from the University of Oregon. She is past President of the Society for the Anthropology of North America, former President of the Association for Feminist Anthropology, and an appointed member of the American Anthropological Association Commission on Race and Racism.

 

Kitty Piercy

Kitty Piercy has served as Eugene, Oregon’s Mayor since 2005.  Prior to that she was an Early Childhood Educator and Elementary School teacher, served as a State Representative three times, and was Public Affairs Director for Planned Parenthood of Southwest Oregon.  She has also served on many committees and commissions, including 13 years on the Oregon Commission for Child Care and the Lane County Commission on Children and Families.  She is a member of the U.S. Conference of Mayors; the Mayors Innovation Project; Mayors for Peace; Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG), and a number of groups and organizations working on Climate Change and sustainability.  Among her other duties she currently chairs the Metropolitan Policy Committee and Lane County Area Transportation Committee; co-chairs the Governor’s Passenger Rail Leadership Council and the planning team for the Regional Accelerator and Innovation Network (RAIN). Mayor Piercy has received a number of awards and recognitions for her work and in 2010 was named Most Valuable Local Official by The Nation magazine.

 

Barbara Pope

Barbara Corrado Pope is the founding director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the University of Oregon. An award-winning teacher, she created the core curriculum of the program and taught history courses in places as diverse as Hungary, Provence, Tuscany, the University of New Mexico, and Harvard Divinity School as well as at Oregon. She has a PhD in the Social and Intellectual History of Europe from Columbia University and served for four years as the Director of the UO’s Clark Honors College. After retiring from a fulfilling academic career, Barbara has been able to pursue the alternative ambition of her youth, writing fiction. She has written three critically acclaimed mysteries set in late nineteenth-century France: Cézanne’s Quarry, The Blood of Lorraine and The Missing Italian Girl. All of her writing is historically grounded and integrates the kind of serious themes—racism, violence against women, religious controversies, gender identities and equality—she addressed in her teaching.

 

Elizabeth Reis

Elizabeth Reis is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Oregon.  Her most recent book, Bodies in Doubt: An American History of Intersex, traces the changing definitions, perceptions, and medical management of intersex (atypical sex development) in America from the colonial period to the present. She is interested broadly in both the history and contemporary analysis of medical ethics, sexuality, and religion. She also serves on the Ethics Committee and the Ethics Consult Team at PeaceHealth Medical Center in Eugene, and is the Content Editor of Nursing Clio, a collaborative blog project that focuses on the intersection of gender, history, and medicine.

 

Roxanne Samer

Roxanne Samer is a Ph.D. Candidate in Cinema and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. She is currently writing her dissertation, Receiving Feminisms: A Cultural History of Lesbian Possibility, which seeks to reorient contemporary feminist and queer perspectives on second wave feminism, and lesbian-feminism in particular, through an analysis of the possibilities imagined by various cultural feminist counterpublics, including feminist science fiction fandom. The interviews she conducted with Amanda Bankier and Jeanne Gomoll, the editors of the first two feminist fanzines (The Witch and the Chameleon and Janus, respectively) was published in Futures of Feminism and Fandom: The WisCon Chronicles Volume 6. She has done research in the Joanna Russ Papers at the University of Oregon’s Special Collections. She also grew up in Oregon and is an alumna of South Eugene High School.

 

Ellen Scott

Ellen Scott is head of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. She received her B.A. from Williams College in 1982, an M.A. in political science from the New School for Social Research in 1990, and a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California at Davis in 1997. She taught for four years at Kent State University, and joined the faculty at the University of Oregon in 2001. Her research interests include social inequality, Gender, Feminist Theory, Race and ethnicity and Welfare policy.

 

Carol Stabile

Carol Stabile, director of the Center for the Study of Women in Society and a professor in the School of Journalism and Communication and Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, teaches interdisciplinary courses on gender, race, and class in media at the University of Oregon. She is the author of Feminism and the Technological Fix, editor of Turning the Century: Essays in Media and Cultural Studies, co-editor of Prime Time Animation: Television Animation and American Culture, and author of White Victims, Black Villains: Gender, Race, and Crime News in US Culture. She is currently completing a book on women writers and the broadcast blacklist in the 1950s, entitled Black and White and Red All Over: Women Writers and the Television Blacklist . She is a founding member of Fembot, an online collaboration of scholars conducting research on gender, new media, and technology, and co-editor of Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology.

 

Lynn Stephen

Lynn Stephen is Distinguished Professor of Arts and Sciences, Professor of Anthropology, and Director of the Center for Latino/a and Latin American Studies (CLLAS), University of Oregon. Her research focuses on ethnicity, gender, class, indigenous peoples and movements, nationalism, immigration, racialization and structural violence linked to globalization. She has conducted research in Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and the U.S. Her current research projects include: political asylum and gendered violence among Mexican immigrants; indigenous autonomy; everyday forms of racism, stress, and health; and a book project on Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska. Her most recent books include Otros Saberes: Collaborative Research on Indigenous and Afro-Descendent Cultural Politics (School for Advanced Research Press, 2013) and We are the Face of Oaxaca: Testimony and Social Movements (Duke University Press, 2013).

 

Susan Sygall

Susan Sygall, co-founder and CEO of Mobility International USA, is an internationally recognized expert in the area of international educational exchange and leadership programs for persons with disabilities. Sygall, who uses a wheelchair, has had a personal and professional commitment to disability rights and women’s issues for more than 30 years. She has co-authored numerous publications in the area of international exchange and international development opportunities for persons with disabilities and co-produced several award winning videos. Sygall has lectured throughout the United States, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia on a variety of topics related to international exchange and disability rights, and has traveled to more than 30 countries. She has received numerous awards for her passionate advocacy for disability rights including the Kellogg Fellows Leadership Alliance Matusak Courageous Leadership Award, the President’s Award from President Bill Clinton, the MacArthur Fellowship, the Ashoka Fellowship, and the Kellogg National Fellowship, which is awarded to approximately 40 outstanding leaders each year in the United States. She has received an honorary doctorate from Chapman University.

 

Kate Wilhelm

Over the span of her career, Kate Willhelm’s writing has crossed over the genres of science fiction, speculative fiction, fantasy and magical realism, psychological suspense, mimetic, comic, and family sagas, a multimedia stage production, and radio plays. Her works have been adapted for television and movies in the United States, England, and Germany. Since her first mystery novel was published in 1963, Wilhelm’s novels and stories have been translated to more than a dozen languages. She has contributed to Quark, Orbit, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Locus, Amazing Stories, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Fantastic, Omni, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Redbook, and Cosmopolitan. Wilhelm and her husband, Damon Knight (1922-2002), also provided invaluable assistance to numerous other writers over the years. Their teaching careers covered a span of several decades, and hundreds of students, many of whom are famous names in the field by their own rights today. They helped to establish the Clarion Writer’s Workshop and the Milford Writer’s Conference. They have lectured together at universities in South America and Asia. They have been the guests of honor and panelists at numerous conventions around the world. Wilhelm continues to host monthly workshops, as well as teach at other events. She is an avid supporter of local libraries and participates in fundraisers when she is able to.

 

Naomi M. Wright

Naomi Wright is a Junior at the University of Oregon studying Psychology and Theatre Arts. She appeared in several University Theatre productions, conducted research with the Baldwin Acquiring Minds lab, and had the pleasure of working with first-year students as a FIG Assistant. Despite her love of science and art, Naomi was (until recently) a SciFi fan in denial. Through Professor Carol Stabile’s Clark Honors College colloquium, “Feminist Science Fiction,” Naomi began exploring the UO’s archival collection of Fem SciFi authors’ correspondences. She is currently writing a one-woman show about James Tiptree, Jr. and Alice Sheldon.

[/column]

[end_columns]