Announcing your 6 “So You Think You Can Blog” contributor contest finalists!

This summer we announced a Feministing first: a contest to find a new contributor to join the Feministing team.

We were so thrilled, humbled, and honestly overwhelmed by the responses that came in. We knew our readers were the best, but we were still blown away by how smart, engaging, and hilarious. We loved all of the entries and it was so hard to narrow it down.

That said, we’re incredibly excited to announce the 6 finalists in the contest. Their bios are below. For the second and final round of the contest, they will each take turns blogging on the site this week. So tune in and check out their pieces! We’ll be announcing a winner early next week.

Your 6 contributor contest finalists are:

Alexandra Brodsky is a recent college grad who just moved yesterday to start work with a Planned Parenthood affiliate. She is dedicated to queering reproductive justice, supporting transformative, non-carceral resistance to violence, and convincing her new puppy to stop biting her.

Amy S. Choi is a freelance journalist based in Brooklyn, N.Y. Her work has appeared in BusinessWeek, Women’s Wear Daily, The Philadelphia City Paper, Time Out New York, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. A dedicated storyteller and volunteer, over the past decade she has worked with organizations such as Girls Write Now, Minds Matter and The All-Stars Project to reach out to low-income urban youth in New York using writing and performance. She took a sabbatical in 2010 to travel through the developing world, including Colombia, Tunisia, Lebanon, India, and Southeast Asia. She is currently working on a book about her travels. Choi holds undergraduate degrees in journalism and poetry from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

Lizy Yagoda is a writer and teacher based in Brooklyn, NY. Her writing and research focuses on sexual violence, racism, fat-positivity, and intersectionality (and cheeseburgers). She spends her little free time getting mad at subway posters, savoring dark beer, and baking brownies. If there was a book about her life, it would be titled “Lizy Yagoda and the Unanticipated Morbid Anecdote”.

Sesali Bowen is a writer and overall bad ass. I’m from Chicago, which makes me cooler than alot of people, and I hate wearing panties. I’m a fly fat girl, an ethical hoochie, and a bunch of other things.

Mimi Arbeit is currently a doctoral student in child development, with a focus on adolescent sexuality and sexual health (read more in her Academic Feminist interview). In her research, she asks questions such as, “what are the features of positive, healthy sexuality for teens?” and “how do college students understand consent?” She is also involved in community-based projects in Boston and throughout Massachusetts to promote and strengthen sexuality education in public schools. She has over a decade of experience in teaching sex ed with young people aged 10 to 40 years old and designing and implementing queer feminist sex ed curricula and programming. She started her own blog four years ago at sexedtransforms.blogspot.com, which includes a series on wedding planning while queer and feminist, in addition to many other personal and professional explorations of feminism. She tweets @mimiarbeit.

Amy Lieberman is a feminist sex educator located in NYC. When not actively smashing the patriarchy by teaching people how to have awesome sex, she enjoys geeking out about musical theater and technology, drinking fine wine while eating cheese and/or chocolate, practicing yoga, and daydreaming about unicorns.