Name Batya Weinbaum | Role Poet | |
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Books Islands of Women and Ama, The curious courtship, Pictures of patriarchy, The Island of Floating Women | ||
Batya Weinbaum (born Betty Susan Weinbaum in 1952) is an American poet, feminist, artist, editor, and professor. In addition to founding Femspec Journal, for which she is an editor, she has published five books and numerous articles and essays in a wide-ranging variety of publications.
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Biography
Born February 2, 1952 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Weinbaum spent her childhood in Terre Haute, Indiana. Her parents Barbara Hyman and Jack Gerald Weinbaum, who were active in the civil rights movement and the presidential campaign of John F. Kennedy, passed on a socio-political consciousness and activism to their daughter. Along with thousands of other anti-war activists Weinbaum participated in the Mayday 1971 protest in which over 7,000 were arrested in Washington, D.C. In the late 1970s Weinbaum voiced her feminist views in several articles published in political journals such as "The Other Side of the Paycheck: Monopoly Capital and the Structure of Consumption," co-authored with Amy Bridges in Monthly Review and "Women in the Transition to Socialism: Perspectives on the Chinese Case," in Review of Radical Political Economics, 1976 and "Redefining the Question of Revolution," in Review of Radical Political Economics, 1977. In 1984 Weinbaum briefly stayed at a commune known as Twin Oaks. Her essay on her experience living in the commune became a chapter in Rudy Rohrlich and Elaine Hoffman Baruch's book, Women in Search of Utopia: Mavericks and Mythmakers Also from 1984 to 1986 Weinbaum met and taught courses with Dr. Liz Kennedy at SUNY Buffalo. Her association with Kennedy helped decide Weinbaum's multicultural approach to her academic direction. In 1997 Weinbaum founded a peer-review feminist journal, Femspec, an interdisciplinary feminist journal dedicated to science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, surrealism, myth, folklore and other supernatural genres and continues as editor-in-chief.
Academic career
From 1998 to 2003 at Cleveland State University Weinbaum taught courses in multicultural literature including different genres, theater, poetry and performance art as well core courses on Shakespeare and Classics. From 2003 to 2007 Weinbaum taught as a peripatetic educator teaching speech and debate and organizing literary events, Beat cafes and Victorian parlors in Cleveland Heights, Ohio. She was also a visiting faculty and curriculum adviser at Pacifica Graduate Institute from 2006 to 2007. This led to a teaching career based on distance learning with a variety of institutions, Gaia University, Ivy Bridge College of Tiffin University, State University of New York's Empire State College Center for Distance Learning and American Public University.