Jerri Lynn Fields
Eileen Fisher
The Ford Foundation
Robyn Goodman
Maris Goodstein
Judy and Walter Grossman
Patti Harris
Mellody Hobson
Cheryl and Ron Howard
I. Chera Sons Foundation
Julie Kavner
Lenora Lapidus
Deborah and John Larkin
Deborah Lee
Harriet N. Leve
Lisa Lopez
Elizabeth Maestre
Brian McClendon
Pat Mitchell
The New York Women’s
Foundation
Suze Orman
Purva Panday
Beth Pearson
Francie Pepper
Sarah Peter
Carol and Lisa Pittleman
Linda Pope
Abby Pogrebin
Emily Scott Pottruck
Allison Prouty
Marie Cecile Renauld
Anthony Romero
Nancy Rose
Jeffrey Seller
The Sister Fund
Howard and Sharon Socol
Starbucks
A’yen Tra
Urvashi Vaid
Verizon
Fran and Barry Weissler
And special thanks to:
The Rockefeller Foundation
Judith Rodin
Katherine McFate
Charlotte Sheedy
Nancy Miller
And to the V-Day Core: Susan Celia Swan, Cecile Lipworth, Kate Fisher, Tony Montenieri, Hibbaq Osman, Shael Norris, Hal Leventhal and Benita Kline, Selina Williams, Heather Moseley, and Amy Squires
ALSO BY EVE ENSLER
Insecure at Last
The Good Body
Necessary Targets
The Vagina Monologues
ABOUT THE WRITERS
Writer-director ABIOLA ABRAMS uses movies and motivation to empower women under an initiative called the Goddess Factory. She is the host of BET’s independent film series The Best Shorts, a short-film vehicle. Abrams’s first novel, Dare, will be published by Simon & Schuster, and she is the creator of the Until the Violence Stops: NYC Women’s Film Festival. She is a former producing host of HBO’s politically incorrect interstitial Chat Zone and the syndicated NBC hip-hop news show The Source. Her award-winning artistic films investigate the themes of gender, race, and empowerment. Read more about her work at www.thegoddessfactory.com.
EDWARD ALBEE is the author of thirty plays, including The Zoo Story; The Sandbox; The American Dream; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; A Delicate Balance; The Lady from Dubuque; Three Tall Women; The Play About the Baby; The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?; Peter and Jerry; and Me, Myself and I. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild Council and president of the Edward F. Albee Foundation. He has won three Pulitzer Prizes, four Tony Awards, the Kennedy Center Honors, and the National Medal of Arts. In 2005, he was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Tony Award.
TARIQ ALI is a novelist, historian, and playwright. He has written six novels and several plays (many in collaboration with Howard Brenton) as well as more than a dozen books on world history and politics. He is a long-standing editor of the New Left Review and lives in London.
MAYA ANGELOU is an American poet, memoirist, actress, and important figure in the American civil rights movement. Angelou is known for the autobiographical writings I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) and All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986). Her volume of poetry Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’Fore I Die (1971) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and in 1993 Angelou read her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” for Bill Clinton’s presidential inauguration at his request.
PERIEL ASCHENBRAND is the author of the critically acclaimed book The Only Bush I Trust Is My Own. In 2003 she created and founded a T-shirt company called Body as Billboard (www.bodyasbillboard.com). She has been the director of 401 Projects since April 2005.
PATRICIA BOSWORTH is an American journalist and biographer and a contributing editor for Vanity Fair. She is the author of the memoir Anything Your Little Heart Desires: An American Family Story and biographies of Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, and the photographer Diane Arbus. She is currently completing a biography of the actress and activist Jane Fonda.
NICOLE BURDETTE is an award-winning actress, playwright, and screenwriter. Vogue has called her “the Holly Golightly dramatist of New York City.” As an actress, Burdette has appeared on stage and screen, most notably opposite Brad Pitt in Robert Redford’s A River Runs Through It and most recently in a recurring role on The Sopranos. She wrote the screenplay adaptation of her play Chelsea Walls, and it premiered in 2002 at the Cannes Film Festival.
KATE CLINTON is a faith-based, tax-paying, American-loving political humorist and family entertainer. She has worked through economic booms and busts, Disneyfication and Wal-Martization, gay movements and gay markets, lesbian chic and queer eyes, and ten presidential inaugurals. She still believes that humor gets us through peacetime, wartime, and scoundrel time. In 2006 Clinton celebrates her twenty-fifth anniversary of performing with a fifty-city It’s Come to This! tour across the United States and Canada. Her second book, What the L?, was nominated in the humor category for the prestigious 2005 Lambda Literary Award.
KIMBERLE CRENSHAW is a leading feminist theorist whose work is international in scope. A professor of law at UCLA and Columbia University, Crenshaw writes in the areas of civil rights, black feminist legal theory, and race. She coined the term “intersectionality” to examine converging oppression and the need to fight all “isms” simultaneously. As a media commentator on social justice issues such as violence against women and affirmative action, she has appeared on MSNBC and NPR’s Tavis Smiley Show. She has also worked with the United Nations, the legal team representing Anita Hill, and the ACLU.
MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM’s most recent novels are The Hours and Specimen Days.
EDWIDGE DANTICAT was born in Haiti and is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory; Krik? Krak!; and The Farming of Bones. She is also the editor of The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States and The Beacon Best of 2000: Great Writing by Men and Women of All Colors and Cultures and has written two young adult novels, Anacaona, Golden Flower and Behind the Mountains, as well as a travel narrative, After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel.
Chilean American ARIEL DORFMAN is a professor of literature at Duke University and has received numerous international awards, including the Sudamericana Award for Novel, the Olivier Award for Best Play (Death and the Maiden, which was made into a feature film by Roman Polanski), and two awards from the Kennedy Center. His books, written in both Spanish and English, have been translated into more than forty languages, and his plays have been staged in more than one hundred countries. Dorfman had three new plays produced in the 2005–6 season: Purgatorio, The Other Side, and Picasso’s Closet. He also contributes regularly to the major newspapers of the world.
MOLLIE DOYLE works as a writer, editor, and producer. For the last ten years, she has had the privilege of working with Eve Ensler, first as the editor of The Vagina Monologues, and then as one of the dedicated people who support V-Day’s mission to stop violence against women. Doyle has edited more than two hundred books and ghost-written several books; conceived, designed, and edited the magazine for the Harry Walker Agency, the world’s largest speakers’ bureau; and helped to produce major theatrical and television events around the world.
SLAVENKA DRAKULIĆ, born in Rijeka, Croatia (the former Yugoslavia) in 1949, is a writer and journalist whose work has been translated in many countries. She has published four novels: Holograms of Fear, Marble Skin, The Taste of a Man, and S.: A Novel About the Balkans. She has also published four nonfiction books: How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, The Balkan Express, Cafe Europa, and They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial in The Hague. Her essays about the
war in the Balkans have appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and other international newspapers and periodicals. She contributes to Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), La Stampa (Italy), Dagens Nyheter (Sweden), and Politiken (Denmark). She currently lives in Stockholm, Vienna, and Zagreb.
DR. MICHAEL ERIC DYSON was named by Essence magazine as one of the forty most inspiring African Americans and by Ebony magazine as one of the hundred most influential black Americans. In his thirteen books, Dyson has taken on some of the toughest and most controversial issues of our day. His latest book is Debating Race. His other books include I May Not Get There with You, Holler If You Hear Me, and Come Hell or High Water. Dyson has won the NAACP Image Award for Why I Love Black Women and Is Bill Cosby Right? Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind? Dyson is the host of a syndicated radio show, The Michael Eric Dyson Show. He is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities and a professor of religious studies and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania.
DAVE EGGERS is the author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, You Shall Know Our Velocity!, How We Are Hungry, and What Is the What. In 1998 he founded McSweeney’s, an independent publishing house, which now produces a quarterly literary journal, a monthly magazine, a daily humor website, and a DVD quarterly of short films. Eggers has also designed most of the books and periodicals published by McSweeney’s. In 2002 he opened 826 Valencia, a writing lab for young people; there are now branches of 826 in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Chicago, and Michigan.
KATHY ENGEL is a poet, an essayist, an organizer, a producer, and a communications and creative consultant for social justice, peace, and human rights. She has co-founded numerous organizations, including MADRE, Riptide Communications, the Hayground School, KickAss-Artists, and East End Women in Black. She has co-produced and conceived of political cultural events and campaigns including Stand with Sisters for Economic Dignity; “Who’s Gonna Be There?” a dramatic dialogue about mentors with Roy Scheider and Danny Glover; Talking Nicaragua; Moving Towards Home; “Who I Will Be”; and Imagining Peace. Her newest books are Ruth’s Skirts (poems and prose) and We Begin Here: Poems for Palestine and Lebanon (co-edited by Kamal Boullata).
EVE ENSLER is a playwright, performer, and activist. Her award-winning play The Vagina Monologues has been translated into 45 languages and performed in more than 112 countries. Ensler’s other plays include Necessary Targets, Conviction, Lemonade, The Depot, Floating Rhoda and the Glue Man, Extraordinary Measures, The Good Body, and The Treatment. Eve is also the author of Insecure At Last: Losing It in a Security Obsessed World. She is also the founder/artistic director of V-Day (www.vday.org), a global movement to end violence against women and girls, which has raised more than $40 million in nine years. She is the recipient of many honorary degrees and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship Award in Playwriting.
JANE FONDA’s work on stage and screen has earned numerous nominations and awards, including Academy Awards for Klute and Coming Home and an Emmy for her performance in The Dollmaker. In addition to her acclaimed career as an actress, Fonda has also produced a number of her films, including Coming Home, Nine to Five, The China Syndrome, On Golden Pond, and The Morning After. Fonda revolutionized the fitness industry with her many workout books and videos. The original Jane Fonda’s Workout video remains the top-grossing home video of all time. Long known for her activism and advocacy, Fonda now focuses much of her time on the organization she founded in 1995, the Georgia Campaign for Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention (G-CAPP), a statewide effort to eliminate teen pregnancy in Georgia. Fonda has also established the Jane Fonda Center for Adolescent Reproductive Health at the Emory University School of Medicine. The center engages in research, education, and training in adolescence and reproductive health. Fonda is a co-founder of the Women’s Media Center and Greenstone Media.
CAROL GILLIGAN is the author of In a Different Voice and, most recently, The Birth of Pleasure. Her adaptation of The Scarlet Letter was presented in 2006 as part of the 2005 Women Center Stage festival and will be produced by the Culture Project next year. Her story “If I Forget Thee” was included in 110 Stories: New Yorkers Write After 9/11. She initiated the Strengthening Healthy Resistance and Courage in Girls project and the Women Teaching Girls/Girls Teaching Women programs, was co–artistic director of the Company of Women, an all-woman theater troupe, and is currently a professor at New York University. She dedicates her monologue “My House Is Wallpapered with Lies” to the eleven-year-old girls whose voices inspired it.
JYLLIAN GUNTHER is an Emmy Award–winning writer and director. Her critically acclaimed documentary Pullout was an official selection at film festivals, including Hamptons, Raindance UK, Newport, and Mill Valley. She also developed a series based on Pullout for New York Times Television/TLC. Most recently, she directed multiple episodes of the Emmy-nominated PBS series Postcards from Buster; a PSA series for PBS (writer/director Emmy, 2002); MTV’s Made; Noggin’s Love High (an original pilot); and the CBS/Nickelodeon/Bill Cosby series Little Bill. She was a staff writer at Nickelodeon and freelances for IFC, AMC, WE, Oxygen, and others. Her plays have been produced in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. She’s currently directing a documentary about the inaugural four years of a small public high school in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. You can visit her website at www.wonderful6inc.com.
SUHEIR HAMMAD is the author of Born Palestinian, Born Black, Drops of This Story, and Zaatar Diva. She is an original writer and performer in the Tony Award–winning Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, and has appeared on every season of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. She was awarded the Women of Color Resource Center’s Sister of Fire Award in 2005.
CHRISTINE HOUSE got involved with V-Day through her performance in The Vagina Monologues in Littleton, Massachusetts, but was drafted into the fight to end violence against women long before the movement had a name. Thank you to Eve Ensler for giving it one! She is honored to be part of this festival.
MARIE HOWE: B.S., University of Windsor. M.F.A., Columbia University. Poet; author of The Good Thief, selected by Margaret At-wood for the National Poetry Series; editor, with Michael Klein, of In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic; author of What the Living Do; recipient of the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Mary Ingram Bunting Fellowship from Radcliffe College, and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Artist Foundation, and the Guggenheim. Faculty member at Sarah Lawrence since 1993.
CAROL MICHÈLE KAPLAN’s plays have been produced in the United States and South Africa and have garnered numerous awards, as has her film and television writing. She has an M.F.A. from the Yale School of Drama, a J.D. from New York University School of Law, and is a member of the Writers Guild of America. Her most recent play, Bot, was awarded an Alfred P. Sloane Foundation grant and will be produced by the Magic Theatre in San Francisco.
MOISÉS KAUFMAN is an award-winning writer and director. His plays Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde and The Laramie Project have been among the most honored and most widely performed plays in America over the last decade. Selected directing credits include the Pulitzer- and Tony Award–winning play I Am My Own Wife, Macbeth (Shakespeare in the Park), This Is How It Goes (Donmar Warehouse), and the HBO film version of The Laramie Project, which opened the 2002 Sundance Film Festival. Kaufman is the founder and artistic director of Tectonic Theater Project, a laboratory for new works in theater and film. He is the recipient of the Joe A. Callaway Award for directing and a Guggenheim Fellowship in play-writing.
MICHAEL KLEIN has written Track Conditions, a memoir; The End of Being Known, a book of essays; and 1990, a book of poems. He is currently writing a book of essays called When I Was a Twin, and recent work is forthcoming in the journal Bloom. He lives in New York and teaches every summer at the Fine Arts Work Center in Province-town, Massachusetts.
NICHOLAS
D. KRISTOF is a columnist for The New York Times. In 1990 Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, also a Times journalist, won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of China’s Tiananmen Square democracy movement. They were the first married couple to win a Pulitzer for journalism. Kristof has also won the George Polk Award, the Overseas Press Club award, the Michael Kelly award, the Online News Association award, and the American Society of Newspaper Editors award. In 2006 he won a second Pulitzer, for commentary. Kristof and WuDunn are the authors of China Wakes and Thunder from the East.
JAMES LECESNE created the critically acclaimed Word of Mouth, directed by Eve Ensler and produced by Mike Nichols. His film
Trevor won an Academy Award and inspired the Trevor Project, a nonprofit organization that operates the only twenty-four-hour suicide prevention helpline for GLBT and Questioning teens. Working with young people in Cambodia, Tibet, and Bosnia, Lecesne created The Road Home: Stories of Children of War, which was presented at the International Peace Initiative at The Hague. He also adapted Armistead Maupin’s Further Tales of the City for Showtime and wrote one of the final episodes of the TV series Will & Grace. His novel, Absolute Brightness, will be published in the fall of 2007.
ELIZABETH LESSER is the co-founder of Omega Institute (www.eomega.org), America’s largest adult education center focusing on health, spirituality, and creativity. She is the author of The Seeker’s Guide and Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow. For the past four years, she and Eve Ensler have spearheaded the Women and Power conferences—electrifying dialogues among women activists, artists, and leaders from around the world. Formerly a midwife and birth educator, she teaches workshops on emotional intelligence, grief and loss, and meditation, and she lectures at colleges, retreat centers, and conferences nationwide.