Joy Ladin’s return to Yeshiva University as a woman after receiving tenure as a man made her the first openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution. Her memoir of gender transition, Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders, was a finalist for a 2012 National Jewish Book Award, and winner of a Forward Fives award.
21st century American writer
Annalee Newitz is a journalist and the author of several science fiction and nonfiction books, including the national bestseller “Four Lost Cities.”
African-American southern ecopoet. Her debut collection, Black Pastoral, won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the 2024 Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and was a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Leonard Prize and the Library of Virginia Prize in Poetry.
American poet and essayist
Mary Renault (pseudonym of Eileen Mary Challans) was a British lesbian writer best known for her widely read historical-fiction novels set in ancient Greece that gained her a large following among straight and gay readers alike.
Pioneering climate scientist
Chicana lesbian feminist artist
Irish saint and 6th century abbess of Kildare
Brenda Appleton has demonstrated outstanding leadership in the trans and gender diverse communities in Victoria, Australia.