The Girl w/ Pen team is made up of our current editors, regular columnists, and contributing writers. To find out more about each member of our team, click on any linked name to see a full bio. If you’d like to join our team, please see “Submit Your Ink.”

Founding Editor

Deborah Siegel

Deborah Siegel, PhD, founder of Girl w/Pen, is an expert on gender, politics, and the unfinished business of feminism across generations. She is the author of Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild, co-editor of the literary anthology Only Child: Writers on the Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing Up Solo, and co-founder of the webjournal The Scholar & Feminist Online.
 
 

Managing Editor

Avory Faucette

Avory Faucette joined Girl w/ Pen as webmaster and contributing editor in 2011. Avory is a queer feminist activist as well as a writer, editor, and blogger. Zie graduated from the University of Iowa with a JD in 2009, focusing on international human rights and gender/sexuality issues in the law. Zie is published in the Journal of Gender, Race, and Justice and hir work will appear in two upcoming anthologies.
 
 

Columnists

Veronica I. Arreola

Veronica directs an academic support program for women majoring in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. She is a long time member of the Chicago feminist community having worked with Chicago NOW, Planned Parenthood, NARAL, Chicago Abortion Fund, NW Suburban NOW, and Women Employed. She also served one year on the National NOW board. Veronica helped launch the Planned Parenthood Action Illinois blog in October 2007 while the staff attended to anti attacks to the opening of a new health center in suburban Chicago. She currently contributes to Chicagonista, WIMNs Voices, and Care2.com. Veronica has consulted with non-profits and authors on their social media and blogging strategies.

Susan Bailey

Susan served as Executive Director of the Wellesley Centers for Women (WCW) and a Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies and Education at Wellesley College for 25 years (1985-2011). Following college she taught in Asia, Latin America and the United States; experiences that fostered her commitment to gender equitable education as a cornerstone of active citizenship. As the principal author of the 1992 AAUW Report: How Schools Shortchange Girls, her insights fostered national public dialog on gender in K-12 education.

Kyla Bender-Baird

Kyla Bender-Baird, author of Transgender Employment Experiences: Gendered Perceptions and the Law, is a Ph.D. student in Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. She holds an M.S. in Women’s Studies from Towson University and a B.A. in Sociology from Principia College.
 
 

Heather Hewett

Heather Hewett writes about women, feminism, and culture in the U.S. and globally. Her essays have appeared in several books, including Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction and Mothering in the Third Wave. Her work on the myths and realities of motherhood and family life has appeared in academic and mainstream publications including The Washington Post, CNN.com, The Christian Science Monitor, The Scholar & Feminist Online, Mothers Movement Online, Ms. Magazine Online, Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers, Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering, and Women’s Studies Quarterly.

Leslie Heywood

Leslie Heywood has an MFA from the University of Arizona, and teaches creative writing and cultural and science studies at SUNY-Binghamton, where, with biologist David Sloan Wilson, she is working on developing a program that integrates the sciences and humanities from an evolutionary perspective. A poet and creative non-fiction writer, she is the author of Pretty Good for a Girl, The Proving Grounds, and Natural Selection; the editor of The Women’s Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third Wave Feminism and co-editor, with Jennifer Drake, of Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism. She has also done much academic work on women in sports, and, more recently, research on creativity, environmentalism, and evolutionary biology.

Allison Kimmich

Allison Kimmich, PhD, is executive director of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA). Her writings about feminist pedagogy, women’s autobiography, and women’s studies have appeared in journals, anthologies, and newsletters. Under Allison’s leadership, NWSA has grown into an international network of nearly 2,500 members with professional development, research, and advocacy initiatives to support women’s studies and women’s center professionals.

Elline Lipkin

Elline Lipkin is a scholar, poet, and nonfiction writer who has also worked as an editor for a variety of newspapers, magazines, and journals. Her first book, The Errant Thread, was chosen by Eavan Boland to receive the Kore Press First Book Award and was published in 2006. Her second book, Girls’ Studies, was published by Seal Press in 2009. Endorsed by Peggy Orenstein and part of the Seal Studies series, Girls’ Studies explores the state of contemporary girlhood in the United States and how gender is imprinted from birth forward.

Adina Nack

Adina Nack PhD, has been researching and writing about health, sexuality and stigma since 1994: starting as an outreach educator for Girls, Inc. of Orange County, CA and continuing through her doctoral work at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Author of the book Damaged Goods? Women Living with Incurable STDs, Nack has published articles and essays on topics including STD stigma, sex education, and HIV/AIDS. She has written for Ms. Magazine, her academic articles have been reprinted in over a dozen anthologies, and she has won awards for her research, teaching, activism, and public policy work.

Alison Piepmeier

Alison Piepmeier is co-editor of Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century (Northeastern University Press, 2003), a collection that is widely taught in Women’s Studies classes, and author of Out in Public: Configurations of Women’s Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America (University of North Carolina Press, 2004), and Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism (New York University Press, 2009). She directs the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the College of Charleston, where she is associate professor of English. She is a recognized academic voice about third wave feminism.

Virginia Rutter

Virginia Rutter, PhD, has been working at the intersection of academia and media for two decades: first in DC in Congress and at a mental health organization, and (during and after her PhD at the University of Washington) as a sociologist translating academic ideas to general audiences. The author of two books (The Gender of Sexuality and The Love Test, both with Pepper Schwartz) and numerous articles for Psychology Today, Virginia has written on topics including divorce, marriage, gender, sexuality, stepfamilies, adolescence, infidelity, depression, women in science, psychotherapy research, couples therapy, and domestic violence.

Natalie Wilson

Natalie Wilson, PhD is a literature and women’s studies scholar, blogger, and author. She teaches at Cal State San Marcos and specializes in the areas of gender studies, feminism, feminist theory, girl studies, militarism, body studies, boy culture and masculinity, contemporary literature, and popular culture. She is author of the blogs Professor, what if? and Seduced by Twilight. She also writes the guest column Monstrous Musings for the Womanist Musings blog.