Bonnie Morris

AUTHOR BIO: Bonnie J. Morris Bonnie J. Morris is a women’s history professor and the author of fifteen award-nominated books. Born on Mother’s Day, 1961, she attended an international elementary school in West Los Angeles, graduated from Carolina Friends School after her family moved to North Carolina, and then earned a B.A. in Jewish history from American University: the first student there to minor in women’s studies. She completed her Ph.D. in women’s history at Binghamton University in upstate New York in 1989, later joining the faculty of Harvard Divinity School, Semester at Sea, and (since 1994) George Washington University and Georgetown. In winter 2012, GWU students elected her Professor of the Year. Dr. Morris began keeping a journal, handwritten in fountain pen ink, at age twelve, and has filled close to 180 volumes. Her public writing career includes essays published in over sixty anthologies of women’s writing, a one-woman play performed in seven countries, and fourteen years working with Mothertongue, D.C.’s spoken-word stage for women. Her work has appeared in Comstock Review, Del Sol Review, Gastronomica, Gay and Lesbian Review, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Lilith, Memoir, Ms., Travelers’ Tales, and the Washington Post; three of her books--Eden Built By Eves (Alyson, 1999), Girl Reel (Coffee House Press, 2000), and Revenge of the Women’s Studies Professor (Indiana, 2009) were Lambda Literary Award finalists. Girl Reel also won the ForeWord award for gay and lesbian memoir. Dr. Morris won two first prize awards for the Israeli-Palestinian peace essay “Devour the Darling Plagues,” which appears in Tara Masih’s award-winning bestseller The Chalk Circle. In 2012, Dr. Morris published the textbook Women’s History for Beginners, which took second prize in the New England Book Festival; and in 2013 she won the national book prize from Finishing Line Press for her first volume of poems, The Schoolgirls’ Atlas. She has been featured on C-SPAN Book TV’s In-Depth Author Profile program as author of the month, won a residency at the Hedgebrook retreat for women writers, and in 2015 won the Bloom prize for LGBT nonfiction with the chapbook Sixes and Sevens. An Exam Leader for the AP U.S. History exam and a scholarly adviser to the National Women’s History Museum, Dr. Morris has been a lecturer for Olivia Cruises and the global Semester at Sea program, and as a staff member for almost every women’s music festival in the U.S. She is now a consultant for Disney Animation, the Global Women’s Institute, the American Psychological Association, Pacifica Radio Archives, and is preparing exhibits on the women’s music movement for the Library of Congress and the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe. Her newest book is The Disappearing L: erasure of lesbian spaces and culture, and, forthcoming from Bywater, Sappho’s Bar and Grill. She may be contacted at www.bonniejmorris.com.