Batya Weinbaum

See Also: 2017. Islands of Women and Amazons: Representations and Realities. Second Edition. 2013. Feminist Voices. Seattle: Aqueduct. 2012. This Could Happen To You: Post 9-11 Memoir. Femspec Books. 1983. El Curioso Noviazgo Entre Feminismo y Socialismo. Madrid: Siglo XXI.

According to Gale Contemporary Authors (2009) additional books and other writings have included

Sasha's Harlem (novel; part one of trilogy), Pyx Press 2004.

Journal of Research on Mothering, spring, 2002, Gail M. Lindsay, review of Islands of Women and Amazons.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES: PERIODICALS Choice, July, 2000, S. A. Inness, review of Islands of Women and Amazons: Representations and Realities, p. 223.

Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 8, 2000, Zina Vishnevsky, "Seeking Zena's Sisters in Legend of Amazons."

Utopian Studies Journal, Volume 11, number 2, 2000, Linda L. Kick, review of Islands of Women and Amazons, pp. 305-307.

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 currently at American Public University, American Public University, and Life University. In 2019, Weinbaum was invited to teach Women and Gender Studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Her work is archived at National Archives of the National Historical Records and Publications Commission, American Women Making History and Culture: 1963-1982 Collection; Yale University Divinity School Library; Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture, Duke University’s Rubenstein Library, Durham, NC; Isha l Isha, Haifa, Israel; University of Colorado, Fort Collins, CO; Mazur, LA; Pacifica Radio Archives, Bay Area, CA; Sexual Minorities Archives, Holyoke, MA; Lesbian Herstory Archives, Brooklyn, NY; News and Public Affairs Archives: Alternative Independent Radio News Programming; Kalvos Damion Broadcast Audio Archive; The Michael Schwartz Library, Cleveland State University.

EDITED JOURNAL ISSUES: 1998-present. Femspec, 31 issues, Vol. 1.1-19.1; 19.2 in production. EDITED BOOK: Mercer, Naomi, Toward Utopia: Feminist Dystopian Writing and Religious Fundamentalism in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Louise Marley’s The Terrorists of Irustan, and Marge Piercy’s He, She and It, Femspec Books and Productions, 2015. IX Chel Press, Issues 1-3, Isla Mujeres.

Mexico in Motion: Actions and Images, Angel Fish Press, 1997.

Fragments of Motherhood (includes prose), Angel Fish Press (East Montpelier, VT), 1996.

Lambda Book Report, January-February, 1994, Judith Katz, review of The Island of Floating Women, p. 36.

Jerusalem Romance, East Coast Editions (Longmeadow, NY), 1993.

Searching for Peace on Hostile Grounds: Interviewing Grassroots Women in Israel, 1989-1999 (2003).

Off Our Backs, August-September, 1979, interview with Weinbaum, p. 22; October, 2000, Carol Anne Douglas, review of Islands of Women and Amazons, p. 16.

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.

Born February 2, 1952 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Weinbaum spent her childhood in Terre Haute, Indiana. Her parents Barbara Adele Hyman and Jack Gerald Weinbaum, who were active in the civil rights movement and the presidential campaigns of John F. Kennedy and following, 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 In the early and mid-80s, she began attending the Michigan Women's Music Festival and worked on the crew the years she wrote the proposal that founded the alternative healing space, Oasis, which she negotiated into being with Kristi Vogel as a result of an outburst of activism of alternative healers on the land. 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. Since 2013 she has been operating a feminist art installation project on Isla Mujeres, MX, and in 2014 bought land in Floyd, VA where she has been developing a feminist educational retreat, organizing gatherings, and offering camping to women interested in experiencing and contributing to healing goddess space. For 25 years she maintained booths at various festivals reading palms, cards, feet, and faces as well as vedic astrology and numerology, and selling goddess art, wearable art from her own wearable art business that she ran for five years, and jewelry cast in silver from her own goddess designs or from ancient goddess designs discovered in her research. She wrote a column on transformational palmistry for five years for the Santa Barbara Independent, after working in Carpinteria at the Pacifica Graduate Institute for two quarters, and subsequently published two books based on this column called Opening Palms, and On the Palmist's Road.