SFinX – Rebel Grrrl

Biographies

 Photo credit Amos Mac.

Meliza Banales aka Missy Fuego writes books, sews clothes, and makes movies.  She has toured with Sister Spit: The Next Generation and Body Heat: The Femme Porn Tour.  She is currently working on a spoken-word album with Crunks Not Dead Records and another collection of short stories, Life Is Wonderful, People Are Terrific.  She makes art in San Francisco.

 Photo credit Morgan Weinert.

Gina De Vries cut her artistic and political teeth on riot grrrl in the mid-nineties. She’s also a queer femme Paisan pervert, and a writer, performer, and activist with a long history doing political organizing in queer and trans communities. Gina’s writing has appeared dozens of places, from the academic to the pornographic – recent publications include Issue #4 of Bound to Struggle: Where Kink and Radical Politics Meet, Girl Crush, and The Revolution Starts at Home. Gina has performed, taught, and lectured everywhere from chapels to leatherbar backrooms, and recent university appearances include Reed College, Yale University, and Harvard University. She is the founder and facilitator of Sex Workers’ Writing Workshop, a writing class for current and former sex workers at San Francisco’s Center for Sex & Culture (where she also serves on the Advisory Board), and the head curator of San Francisco in Exile, a performance series showcasing San Francisco’s best up-and-coming queer underground artists. Gina is currently pursuing her MFA in Fiction Writing at San Francisco State University. She likes glitter, the color fuchsia, leopard print, and political discussion as foreplay. Find out more at queershoulder.tumblr.com.

 Photo credit Leilani Nisperos

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a Worcester raised, Toronto matured, Oakland-based queer Sri Lankan writer, performer and teacher. She is the 2009-10 Artist in Residence  at UC Berkeley’s June Jordan Poetry for the People program and the co-founder and co-artistic director of Mangos With Chili, North America’s only touring cabaret of queer and trans people of color performing artists. She is a 2009 commissioned performer with Sins Invalid, the national performance organization of queer people with disabilities and chronic illnesses. Her one woman show, Grown Woman Show, has toured nationally, including performances at the National Queer Arts Festival, Swarthmore College, Yale University, Reed College and McGill University. The author of Consensual Genocide, her writing has appeared in the anthologies Yes Means Yes, Visible: A Femmethology, Homelands, Colonize This, We Don’t Need Another Wave, Bitchfest, Without a Net, Dangerous Families, Brazen Femme, Femme and A Girl’s Guide to Taking Over The World. She is finishing her second book of poetry, Love Cake, and her first memoir, Dirty River and is happy about the forthcoming publication of The Revolution Starts At Home: Transforming Abuse Through Community Accountability, which she co-edited with Ching-In Chen and Jai Dulani, by South End Press in 2010. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College, focusing on creative nonfiction and community-based teaching by writers of color.

Billie Rain is a fierce warrior lioness and old school riot grrrl who spends most of hir time horizontal and then creates bad-ass work as a filmmaker and author.

Durt Vs. Angela Chase. In 1992, Durt Vs. Angela Chase sprang fully formed from the forehead of Kathy Acker, in the form of a zine titled JIGSAW KILL. Eighteen years later they turned into a band.