BARBARA SMITH is an author, activist, and independent scholar who has played a groundbreaking role in opening up a national cultural and political dialogue about the intersections of race, class, sexuality, and gender. She is the co-editor of Conditions: Five, The Black Women's Issue (with Lorraine Bethel); and All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies (with Akasha (Gloria) Hull and Patricia Bell-Scott). She is the general editor of The Reader's Companion to U.S. Women's History (with Wilma Mankiller, Gwendolyn Mink, Marysa Navarro, and Gloria Steinem), and is the co-author of Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism (with Minnie Bruce Pratt and Elly Bulkin). A collection of her essays, The Truth That Never Hurts: Writings on Race, Gender, and Freedom was published by Rutgers University Press in 1998 and was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award and was a Nonfiction Award finalist for the American Library Association's Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Book Award. Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around: Forty Years of Movement Building, edited by Alethia Jones and Virginia Eubanks, with Barbara Smith was published in 2014. It won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir/Biography and the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction from the Publishing Triangle. Smith was the cofounder and publisher of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the first U.S. Publisher for women of color until 1995, and served two terms as a member of the Albany Common Council from 2006-2013. In 2005, she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Maureen Honey is a professor of English and women's studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is co-editor with Venetria K. Patton of Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology, editor of Bitter Fruit: African American Women in World War II, and author of Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender, and Propaganda during World War II.
