Mary Kay Blakely joined the Journalism School faculty in September, 1997, and teaches Advanced Writing in the magazine sequence. A contributing editor to Ms. magazine since 1981 and former Hers columnist for The New York Times, she is the author of the critically acclaimed Wake Me When It's Over and American Mom. Her essays on social and political issues have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, LIFE, Vogue, Family Circle, Self, Parents, Newsday, Los Angeles Times Magazine, Lear's, Glamour, Working Woman as well as other national publications. Her work has been collected in fourteen writing anthologies and published in Australia, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and Japan.

Blakely is on the National Advisory Board for Women's Enews, the National Writer's Union and MOMbo, a syndicated radio program. She has been on the Board of Directors for the Journalism and Women's Symposium (JAWS) and is currently serving on its Minority Mentor Program. She received the EMMA (Exceptional Merit Media Award) and Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Her television appearances include news commentaries on the Today Show, Oprah, Larry King Live, CBS This Morning, Charlie Rose, C-SPAN, Good Morning America, CNN and other news programs.

In 2000, Blakely established the Journalism School's partnership with the New School University and helped launch the summer program in New York, which provides MU students with internships, professional experience and a multi-media course of study in Manhattan. Her writing students regularly contribute feature stories, essays and literary journalism to the Missourian and Vox, a weekly news magazine in Columbia, as well as national monthly magazines. The students' radio commentaries have also aired on National Public Radio and Pacifica Network News.

Rishma Dunlop is Literary Editor for MIRCI's Demeter Press. She is an essayist, dramatist, poet and fiction writer. Rishma Dunlop is the author of three books of poetry: The Body of My Garden, Reading Like a Girl, and Metropolis. She is co-editor of Red Silk: An Anthology of South Asian Canadian Women Poets and editor of White Ink: Poems on Mothers and Motherhood. Her radio drama, The Raj Kumari’s Lullaby, was commissioned and produced by CBC Radio and published in Where is here? The Drama of Immigration. Her poetry has won awards including the 2003 Emily Dickinson Prize, and has been published in Canada, the US, South Africa, and the UK. Her work has been awarded grants from the Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council and Canada Council of the Arts. Rishma Dunlop is a professor of English and Education at York University, Toronto. She is Poet-in-Electronic Residence at the Centre for Cross Faculty Inquiry, University of British Columbia for 2006-2007 and editor of Studio, an online poetry journal. She will be Coordinator of Creative Writing in English at York University in July 2007.

www.rishmadunlop.com

Andrea O'Reilly is founder and director of MIRCI. Click here to find out more about Andrea.

Joanna Radbord received a Bachelor of Arts with Highest Honours in Philosophy and Women's Studies in 1992, and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology in 1993. She graduated from Osgoode Hall Law School in 1997 and was called to the Bar of Ontario in 1999. She is a lawyer with the firm Martha McCarthy and Company. Joanna has worked with Martha since she was a student, and has acted for clients at trial, the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court of Canada.

Joanna assisted Martha with M. v. H., a Supreme Court of Canada decision resulting in the recognition of same-sex relationships in dozens of federal and provincial statutes. She was counsel to a lesbian father in Forrester v. Saliba, a ruling that holds transsexuality to be irrelevant to a child's best interests. She has acted as co-counsel for the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) in cases involving the feminization of poverty, including the spousal support variation case Boston and the retroactive child support case DBS. She was co-counsel to the Ontario and Quebec same sex couples who won the freedom to marry in Halpern and on the Reference re Same-Sex Marriage before the Supreme Court. Joanna also appeared as counsel in Rutherford, achieving immediate legal recognition for lesbian mothers, and represented the Rutherford families as intervener counsel in A.A. v. B.B. v. C.C., the case allowing recognition of three parents in law. Joanna also assisted LEAF with interventions in the Charter challenge of Little Sisters v, Canada, and a family case addressing remedies for default of family court orders, Dickie.

Joanna is the author of numerous papers dealing with substantive equality and family law. She is also a frequent speaker at legal and academic conferences, and to community groups. She is on the Advisory Board of the MIRCI, and on the editorial board of its Journal and the Journal for GLBT Family Studies.

Sara Ruddick (2007-2011) lived in New York City where she taught for many years at New School University. Her most recent collection, Mother Troubles, co-edited with Julia Hanigsberg, a legal theorist who lives in Toronto, considers dilemmas of motherhood for which there are no easy answers. This book represents an early attempt to think about institutions and cultures of motherhood that might serve mothers well. In her first collection,Working It Out, published in 1976 and co-edited with Pamela Daniels,women wrote personal essays about their struggles doing their chosen work. This was followed by another collection of personal essays, Between Women edited with Carol Ascher and Louise de Salvo published in 1984 and later published in a second edition with an introduction by Carolyn Heilbrun. These essays, taken collectively, continued to tell the story of women's struggles doing work of their own, raised the issue of "objective" knowledge, and explored a then unexplored personal relationship between biographer or critic and their subject. During these years she began to think about mothers' thinking and in 1980, published the essay "Maternal Thinking" and in 1989 the book Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace, published with a new introduction in 1995 .Throughout these years she has written steadily, though not copiously, about war, non-violence, maternal thinking, and the connections and contrasts between them. Two decades after promising that Maternal Thinking was at least connected to a politics of peace she was still trying to create transformative understandings of mothering as a resource for non-violent practices, still trying to forge the links that would make thinking maternally a way of thinking against the grain of violence.

Lori Saint-Martin is a professor in the literature department at the Université du Québec à Montréal. She has published two books of short fiction, Lettre imaginaire à la femme de mon amant (1991) and Mon père, la nuit (1999), French translations of 6 English-Canadian novels, in collaboration with Paul Gagné, and several books of non-fiction on women's writing in Québec, including Le nom de la mère. Mères, filles et écriture dans la littérature québécoise au féminin (The Name of the Mother: Mothers, Daughters and Writing in Quebec Women's Fiction), 1999. Her current research project is on fathers and children in contemporary Québec fiction (supported by SSHRC grant). With Paul Gagné, she has two children, Nicolas, born in 1993, and Anna, born in 1995.

Judith Stadtman Tucker is a writer and activist. She is the founder and editor of the Mothers Movement Online, and a member of the NOW Mothers' and Caregivers' Economic Rights Committee. She previously served as co-coordinator for the May 2006 ARM Conference on Caregiving and Carework.

Gina Wong-Wylie, Ph.D., is a Registered Psychologist and an Associate Professor in the Graduate Centre for Applied Psychology at Athabasca University, and faculty member in the Campus Alberta Applied Psychology: Counselling Initiative, a tri-university collaboration between University of Calgary, Athabasca University, and University of Lethbridge. Gina’s research interests include reflective practice in counsellor education and development, constructivist theory and practice, feminist theory, and prenatal/perinatal psychology. Her private counselling practice focuses on supporting women through maternal transitions. She has two young daughters and resides in Alberta, Canada.