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Happy birthday, Alexandra!

Happy 26th birthday to our favorite senior editor, Alexandra!

Alexandra, hard at work

In case you’ve been living in a cave for the past five years, Alexandra is a bamf. She’s been writing at Feministing since she won our You Think You Can Blog Contest in 2012. Since then, she’s co-founded a national nonprofit and published a book — all while a student in law school. Just today she helped file a class action lawsuit against the state of Connecticut. (Casual.) Among her other accomplishments are testifying before the U.S. Senate, making her modeling debut, and mothering an adorable three-pound pomchi rescue named Margot, who has stellar taste in television and gives the best book recommendations around.

I’ve known Alexandra for nearly four years now, after a mutual friend introduced us (God bless you, David) and, over the course of that time, I’ve been awed by her wisdom, organizing savvy, endless energy, and remarkable willingness to sit with and struggle through the tensions between sometimes competing (or, as she says, mutually dependent!) political commitments. I’m particularly grateful to her for her work articulating a robust vision of civil rights law as alternative to the criminal legal system — one that supports survivors and holds perpetrators accountable without expanding a violent prison system to do it.

Here at Feministing, Alexandra’s reflected thoughtfully on the connections between campus gender violence and police brutality, her own (evolving) positionality within the anti-rape movement, and the “not that bad” of heterosexual sex in the 21st century. I find myself returning again and again to her piece on how we bear witness to trauma without losing sight of our identity beyond its margins. You also don’t want to miss her reflections on female desire.

Please join me in wishing Alexandra a very happy 26th!

New Haven, CT

Dana Bolger is a Senior Editor at Feministing and the co-founder of Know Your IX, the national youth-led organization working to end gender violence in schools. She's testified before Congress on Title IX policy and legislative reform, and her writing has appeared in a number of outlets, including The New York Times, Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. She's also a student at Yale Law School, and you can find her on Twitter at @danabolger.

Dana Bolger is a Senior Editor at Feministing and a student at Yale Law School.

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