Our Contributors

AMY ALLISON is an English teacher at the Delta Alternative high school program in Centre County, Pennsylvania.

NAOMI AYALA, a native of Puerto Rico, now lives in Washington, D.C., where she works as an education consultant, freelance writer, and teacher. Her poetry has appeared in many journals in the United States and beyond. She is now a co-chair of the Board of Directors of Teaching for Change: Building Social Justice Starting in the Classroom. In 2000 she walked 1,000 miles of the Appalachian Trail.

BETH BERILA is the Director of the Women's Studies Program at St. Cloud State University. Her work focuses on popular culture, environmental justice issues, and community- based arts as social change. Her articles have appeared in New Perspectives on Environmental Justice, MELUS, and Feminist Teacher.

GIOVANNA DI CHIRO teaches environmental studies and women's studies at Mount Holyoke College. She has published widely on the topics of community-based knowledge production and environmental justice. She is a co-editor of the recently published collection, Appropriating Technology: Vernacular Science and Social Power (University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

VICTORIA FOLKS is a feminist middle-school teacher living in Berkeley, California. She is interested in language and power in postcolonial literatures, as well as in issues of sexuality.

MARNINA GONICK is an assistant professor in the departments of curriculum and instruction and women's studies at the Pennsylvania State University.

LISA COCHRAN HIGGINS is an assistant professor of English at the College of DuPage in Glen Ellyn, Illinois. She received a Ph.D. in American Literature with a Women's Studies Concentration from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2001. Her dissertation was entitled "The Adulteress in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction and Culture." Her article on anti-suffrage literature was published in Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers in 2004.

MARY HURLEY is an assistant professor of communications at the Forest Park campus of St. Louis Community College, where she teaches film and communication courses and will direct a play this fall as well. She is an aficionado of American pop culture and has worked in radio.

MARY KIRK is an assistant professor in the Individualized, Interdisciplinary & Lifelong Learning Department at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, Minnesota. She holds a Ph.D. in Women's Studies/Women in Computing from Union Institute and University and an M.A. in Women's Literature from the University of Illinois at Springfield.

ARLENE PLEVIN has been involved with environmental justice issues as a writer and editor for the National Wildlife Federation. Her work has appeared in The Literature of Nature: An International Sourcebook; New Perspectives on Environmental Justice: Gender, Sexuality, and Activism; and Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches, among others. She received a Ph.D. in English at the University of Washington and was a Fulbright Lecturer in Taiwan, doing research and teaching at Tamkang University.

LAURA SHANNON graduated from the Delta Program and is currently studying biology and anthropology at Grinnell College in Iowa.

JOCELYN FENTON STITT is a visiting assistant professor in the Women's Studies department at Minnesota State University, Mankato. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan's joint program in English and Women's Studies in 2001 and was a fellow and educational outreach coordinator at the International Museum of Women in San Francisco, California. Her research and pedagogical interests include Caribbean and British cultural studies, the politics of motherhood, and transnational feminism with a focus on the African diaspora.

JULIE SZE is an assistant professor of American Studies at the University of California at Davis. Her research focuses on the culture and politics of the environmental justice movement, urban environmentalism, and environmental health. Her forthcoming book from MIT Press examines environmental justice activism in New York City, asthma politics, garbage and energy policy in the age of privatization and deregulation.