Penelope Gay Dane, Ph.D., is an award winning scholar, writer, poet, and activist. Her work can be found online on Autostraddle.com, the Gender & Society blog, thestreet.com, and in the International Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality, and the anthology This Assignment is So Gay: LGBTIQ Poets on the Art of Teaching and in the forthcoming Sense Publications series Imagination and Praxis: Criticality and Creativity in Education and Educational Research. Currently living in Clinton, NY, Penelope is a visiting scholar at Hamilton College, where she has been conducting workshops on cultural diversity. During the past year, Dr. Dane worked with the refugee population in Utica, NY, helping young adult refugees from Somalia, Sudan, and Burma obtain their first jobs.
Dr. Dane moved to Louisiana from Massachusetts in 2005 and earned her MFA from Louisiana State University in 2008. She has been a finalist in the William Faulkner – William Wisdom Creative Creative Writing Competition in several categories previously. Her fiction appeared in the anthology My Body, My Health and her work has appeared in the 2013 Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality. Her Ph.D. dissertation was on lesbian characters in contemporary American fiction and, currently, she is working on a novel based on her dissertation research. Other current projects include a tongue-in-cheek Spell Book/poetry Collection, playing with the concept of spells cast
by her ancestors, who were among the Salem witches.