ON THE ISSUES MAGAZINE ONLINE is a successor to the print publication, On The Issues Magazine, a progressive, feminist quarterly print publication from 1983 to 1999, both published by Choices Women’s Medical Center, Merle Hoffman, President and CEO, located in Long Island City, New York. For inquiries about On The Issues Magazine, contact managingeditor@ontheissuesmagazine.com

Merle Hoffman, Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, is a writer, activist and health care provider. She is the Founder, President and CEO of CHOICES Women’s Medical Center, one of the nation's largest and most comprehensive women's medical facilities. Established in 1971 with a vision of patient empowerment through knowledge and education -- “Patient Power" -- Choices serves more than 50,000 patients a year. She also established Choices Mental Health Center which specialized in the treatment of rape incest and domestic violence. In an historic joint venture with the Yelstin Government she worked on developing the first feminist outpatient medical center in Russia as well as organizing Russian Feminists to deliver an open letter to Boris Yeltsin on the state of women's health care. As an activist and organizer, Hoffman was co-founder of the National Abortion Federation (NAF), founder of the New York Pro-Choice Coalition, and organized the first pro-choice civil disobedience action at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City.She is a frequent media guest and speaker, including at the 1995 International Women’s Conference in Beijing. She co-produced the documentary film, “Abortion: A Different Light," and produced and hosted a thirty minute cable TV show entitled "MH: On The Issues." In 2002, she was appointed to the National Advisory Board of American Philosophical Practitioners Association. Her archives were acquired by Duke University in 2002 and are a major part of the Sally Bingham Center's women's History papers. Hoffman has been honored for her work by the Department of Corrections of New York City, National Organization for Women (NOW), Women's Health Care Services, Ecovisions, Community Action Network, the National Victim's Center, the Congress of Racial Equality, the Veteran Feminists of America, former NYC Mayor Ed Koch, and others. Hoffman writes frequently on topics related to women, politics and medical care, including for the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology and the Journal of American Women's Associations, in addition to her groundbreaking interviews and editorials in On The Issues Magazine.
To contact: merle@ontheissuesmagazine.com

Cindy Cooper, Managing Editor, is an award-winning playwright, journalist and author. She writes frequently about women, justice and reproductive rights. Her articles have appeared in The Nation, Feminist Studies, In These Times, FAIR Extra!, Poz, Canadian Woman Studies, Women’s eNews, the National Law Journal, Ms. and elsewhere. Cooper’s plays have been produced off-Broadway and at dozens of theaters throughout the nation. A former practicing lawyer, she is the author of six books, most recently co-authoring with Elizabeth Holtzman, The Impeachment of George W. Bush: A Practical Guide for Concerned Citizens (The Nation Books).
To contact: managingeditor@ontheissuesmagazine.com

Sarah Browning, Co-Poetry Editor, is director of Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness and DC Poets Against the War. She is the author of Whiskey in the Garden of Eden (The Word Works, 2007) and co-editor of D.C. Poets Against the War: An Anthology (Argonne House Press, 2004). The recipient of an artist fellowship from the DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities, she has also received a Creative Communities Initiative grant and the People Before Profits Poetry Prize. She was founding director of Amherst Writers & Artists Institute - creative writing workshops for low-income women and youth - and Assistant Director of The Fund for Women Artists, an organization supporting socially-engaged art by women. She co-hosts the Sunday Kind of Love reading series at Busboys and Poets in Washington, DC, where she lives with her husband and son.

Judith Arcana, Co-Poetry Editor, writes poems, stories, essays and books; her work has been published widely for more than thirty years, in print and online. She’s the author of two classic motherhood studies, Our Mothers’ Daughters and Every Mother’s Son, as well as Grace Paley’s Life Stories, A Literary Biography and the recent poetry collection What if your mother. Judith is a frequent speaker and performer of her work at colleges, community events, libraries and bookstores. Her newest book is 4th Period English, a chapbook of poems about immigration and related themes – about which Alicia Ostriker has written: “Judith Arcana’s 4th Period English is so wonderful, I feel privileged to have read it, and I wish it were part of every curriculum starting right now…. This is absolutely terrific writing.” Visit her website juditharcana.com
To contact: Judith@ontheissuesmagazine.com

Mark D. Phillips, Technology and Creative Design Director, worked for over twenty years as a photojournalist, including for three newspapers and two major news services. In 1992, he won First Place awards for his Sports photography in the Pictures of the Year competition and First Place from the Baseball Hall of Fame while working for Agence France-Presse. In 1994, he and five photographers formed a company to combine traditional media and new technology. Later that year, he experimented with photo transmission while in South Africa covering Nelson Mandela’s election as the first black president. In 2001, as a witness to the World Trade Center attacks, he captured on camera an eerie image that came to be known as “Satan in the Smoke” and received enormous worldwide attention across the Internet. A Brooklyn resident, Phillips also operates SouthBrooklyn.net.
To contact: mark@ontheissuesmagazine.com

Linda Stein, Art Editor. The concepts of Protection and Justice have permeated Stein’s sculpture for the last three decades, culminating in Knights, her sculptural series of body-as-armor. She references icons from spiritual and pop culture, especially the superhero, Wonder Woman from World War II comics, who excites Stein as a defending warrior who never killed in her pursuit for peace and security. The Power to Protect: Sculpture of Linda Stein, travelled in 2006 to Flomenhaft Gallery, Chelsea, NY and Longstreth Goldberg Art, Naples FL. In 2007, a retrospective was shown at the Rosen Museum, Boca Raton, FL and an exhibition was mounted at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ. In 2009, Linda Stein Sculpture--Strong Suit:Armor as Second Skin was shown at the National Association of Women Artists. Stein's videos are on YouTube and her papers are archived at The Sophia Smith Collectio, Smith College, Northampton, MA. Stein’s work can be viewed on www.LindaStein.com and her most recent catalog obtained through www.amazon.com. To contact: LindaStein@ontheissuesmagazine.com

Eleanor Bader, Contributing Editor, teaches college English and journalism. She writes for The Brooklyn Rail, The Indypendent, Z Magazine, The Progressive, The L Magazine, RHRealityCheck.org and Library Journal. She is also an activist and the co-author of Targets of Hatred: Anti-Abortion Terrorism (Palgrave/St.Martin's Press, 2001).

Georgia Kral, Editorial and Outreach Assistant, is a writer, blogger and photographer from Brooklyn. Kral has a master's degree in journalism from the City University of New York and a bachelor's degree from Hampshire College. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times and The NY Press and on Spinner.com. She writes and edits a music blog called Microphone Memory Emotion.
To contact: georgia@ontheissuesmagazine.com or 718-391-0023

CONTRIBUTORS To: "EQUALITY: How much further away?"

Eleanor Bader (Snood by Snood, Tight-Knit Orthodox Piety Loosens Up) is a freelance writer, teacher, and activist. She writes for The Brooklyn Rail, The L Magazine, RHRealitycheck.org, and other progressive and feminist publications.

Lu Bailey (Defeating Racism and Sexism with the Politics of Authenticity) is the former president of the Chicago Council on Urban Affairs and the co-founder of the Women of the Millennium Project (an initiative to build partnerships and collaborations among racially diverse groups of women). Currently, she's working as a fundraising consultant for a program that provides "green" job training skills for low-income youth. She is also a recipient of several awards, including the Metropolitan Chicago and Lake County, IL YWCA Racial Justice Award.

Elizabeth Black (Good Girls, Bad Girls: The Kinkiness of Slut-Shaming) lives on the Massachusetts coast by the ocean with her husband and four cats. She writes for Alternet Sexis Magazine, Good Vibrations Magazine, and the Ms. Magazine Blog. Visit her blog at http://trishwilson.typepad.com/blog.

Marcy Bloom (Health Inequality: Gates Foundation Bans Abortion) worked as an abortion counselor and clinic director in New York, and for more than 18 years served as the executive director of Aradia Women's Health Center in Seattle. In 2006, she received the William O. Douglas Award, the Washington State ACLU's lifetime achievement award. She is currently the U.S representative for the Mexico City-based GIRE~Grupo de Informacin en Reproduccin Elegida (The Information Group on Reproductive Choice), Mexico's leading for for reproductive justice and access to legal abortion.

Angela Bonavoglia (Women Challenge Gender Apartheid in the Catholic Church) is a journalist and author, most recently, of "Good Catholic Girls: How Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the Church," now available on Kindle. She blogs regularly at the Huffington Post. Visit her at www.goodcatholicgirls.com.

Megan Carpentier (Alright Then, Let Men Compete) is an Associate Editor at Talking Points Memo and freelance writer whose work has been published by The Guardian, Bitch, RHRealityCheck.com, Women's eNews, the Women's Media Center and Ms. Magazine, among other places. She was previously the editor of news and politics at Air America and an editor at Jezebel.com.

Carolyn Cook (Say "I Do": Constitutional Equality is Forever) is an innovative social strategist with a background in Communications, Human Resources and Work/Life initiatives. She recently founded, United For Equality, LLC, solely dedicated to ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment by 2015. She can be reached at info@united4equality.com; follow on Twitter at http://twitter.com/United4Equality and Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/pages/United-for-Equality-LLC/109519812431906.

Cindy Cooper (Gender Equality: Devil in the Details), managing editor, is an independent journalist in New York and has a background as a lawyer.

Ariel Dougherty (Girls Kick: Moving the Media's World Cup Goal Posts) is national project director of Media Equity Collaborative, an effort to improve the funding and resources available for a broad range of women's centered media throughout the U.S. The new film, Women Art Revolution, which she assisted to produce, will be released this fall. She was a co-founder of Women Make Movies.

Mary Lou Greenberg (Beyond Equality to Liberation) is an activist and contributing writer to Revolution newspaper.

Beverly Cooper Neufeld (Best City for Working Women: In Our Checkbooks) is a consultant to non-profits, VP of the New York Women's Agenda and Director of the Equal Pay Coalition NYC, and formerly Executive Director of The White House Project. She can be reached at bcneufeld@gmail.com.

Loretta J. Ross (A Feminist Vision: No Justice-No Equity) is National Coordinator of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective, headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.

Marie Shear ("Little Marie": The Daily Toll of Sexist Language) articles, columns and book reviews has written for more than 50 periodicals, anthologies and reference books. She has written about the media, women, politics, popular culture, bigotry, disability rights and the right to die for the Women's Review of Books, New Directions for Women, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and Harvard's African American National Biography project. The latest version of her article "Solving the Great Pronoun Problem" was published by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. She is a member of the National Writers Union and the Editorial Freelancers Association.

Linda Stein ( Regina Frank Is Present) is the Art Editor of On The Issues Magazine. She begins a three-year traveling exhibition of her art in Iowa in September 2010.

POETS

Maria Padhila (Abundance [from Lilith Poems]) is the pen name of a Washington D.C. marketing writer and freelance journalist whose work has appeared in publications including The Washington Post and the Miami Herald. Her short stories have appeared in Gargoyle magazine and the Gravity Dancers anthology of women's writing, and she was a finalist in the 2008 Split This Rock national poetry contest. She writes the Capitol Cougar blog.

Penelope Scambly Schott (Ex-husband) has recently published Six Lips(Mayapple Press, 2009). "Ex-husband" appeared in May the Generations Die in the Right Order (Main Street Rag, 2007). In 2008 she won the Oregon Book Award in Poetry for her verse biography A is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth.

Wendy Vardaman (Choreography) is the author of Obstructed View (Fireweed Press, 2009) and the co-editor of Verse Wisconsin. Her website is wendyvardaman.com.

Sondra Zeidenstein (Subjection of Women) is a poet and publisher of Chicory Blue Press, a small press focusing on poetry by older women. Her two collections of poetry are A Detail in that Story and Resistance. She is editor of several anthologies, including Family Reunion: Poems about Parenting Grown Children and A WIder GIving: Women Writing after a Long Silence.

FEATURED VIDEO

Ann Farmer (Equality Under the Hood: Car Repair is Women's Work) is a freelance journalist who covers local news for The New York Times and writes about culture, law and other topics for magazines including Emmy, the Directors Guild of America Quarterly and the American Bar Association's Perspectives. She resides in Brooklyn, N.Y.

FEATURED ARTIST

Regina Frank Is Present, A Retrospective of the Artist's Work.

ARTISTS

Roz Dimon

Robin Gaynes-Bachman

Barbara Lubliner

Kathleen Migliore-Newton