Called "the hardest-working woman in feminism" by Michelle Tea, Jaclyn Friedman is a writer, performer, and activist. Her writing has been featured in Bitch Magazine, AlterNet, Women's eNews, PW.org, and PopPolitics. She's also appeared as a guest blogger on Feministe, and in the Lambda Award nominated anthology Pinned Down By Pronouns. Friedman holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College and has received a 2001 Cambridge Poetry Award, a 2004 Somerville Arts Council Artist Grant, and a recent fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center.

In her work as the Program Director for the Center for New Words, she programs and produces a 50 plus event-per-year series of author discussions, as well as writing workshops, open mics, political discussions, music concerts, book groups, and special events. She is Co-Founder and Co-Chair of WAM!, CNW's conference on Women, Action & the Media. Before coming to CNW, Friedman worked as Program Director of the LiveSafe Foundation, an organization dedicated to teaching self-defense, de-escalation, and safety skills in communities with high rates of violence. In her spare time, Friedman plots world domination through truth and secretly watches reality television. Her favorite lipstick color is Wicked.

Jessica Valenti is the founder and Executive Editor of Feministing.com and the author of Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman’s Guide to Why Feminism Matters. She is also the blogger for BushvChoice.com, NARAL’s Pro-Choice America’s site. Jessica is the co-founder of The Real Hot 100, a national campaign aimed to bring attention to the work that young women activists are doing in the United States. She has a master’s degree in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University and has worked for organizations such as Legal Momentum (formerly NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund), Planned Parenthood, the Women's Environment, and Development Organization (WEDO) and Ms. magazine. She has also volunteered at Mount Sinai's Sexual Assault and Violence Intervention Program (SAVI) as an emergency room advocate and taught Women's Studies at SUNY Albany.

Feministing.com is a well-established site in the feminist and blog communities—particularly with younger women. Feministing’s irreverent voice and sarcastic tone combined with its ability to cover hard news stories makes the site stand out from its online peers. Feministing is the most popular feminist blog, and is quickly becoming the most popular feminist website—it’s ranked higher than feminist.com or feminist.org. The site’s audience is growing at an extremely fast rate. Feministing has gained approximately 10,000 new hits a month since last year; the site now has about 150,000 unique readers every month. Feministing has been covered in The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, The Dallas Morning News, The Ottowa Sun, and In These Times, and on Salon.com, Women’s eNews, and Slate.com. Jessica Valenti has been quoted extensively in print and has been featured on Air America Radio’s The Majority Report and in the popular podcast SexTalk. Jessica was also a recent speaker at the National Council for Research on Women’s annual Power Matters conference.

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