Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born in Torquay, England, into a middle-class family. In her early years, she was homeschooled by her parents and taught herself to read at the age of five, against her mother’s wish. In 1901, at 10, she wrote her first poem, “The Cow Slip.” That same year, her father died, and not long after, her mother remarried, and the family moved to Cheadle, Cheshire. She began to receive formal education at Miss Guyer’s Girls’ School but had trouble adjusting to the strict environment. At 15, she was sent to a boarding school in Paris, where she mainly had piano lessons and vocal training. Following her return to England, she began writing short stories reflecting her interest in spiritualism and the paranormal. These include The Call of Wings, and The House of Beauty, later published as The House of Dreams. In addition, she began working on her first novel, Snow Upon the Desert, which she tried to publish under a pseudonym but got rejected by six different publishers. In 1912, at 22, she began a relationship with a military officer named Archie Christie. At the outbreak of World War I, he was sent to fight in France, and the couple had to wait for his home leave to get married. During the war, she volunteered as a nurse at the Voluntary Aid Detachment of the Red Cross. There, she met many Belgian soldiers, which inspired her to create the character of Hercule Poirot – a former Belgian police officer “with a magnificent mustache.” He appeared in Christie’s first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, as the distinguished detective and later in 25 more novels and numerous short stories. That first novel was written in 1916 but was published only in 1920 after Christie signed a six books contract with The Bodley Head publication. After the war, Christie and her husband moved to London, and in 1919 she gave birth to her daughter Rosalind. She continued to write thrillers and murder mystery stories, developing new detective characters, such as Tommy and Tuppence in The Secret Adversary and Miss Jane Marple in the short story collection The Thirteen Problems. In 1926, she published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which was an immediate best-seller, and years later was voted the best crime novel ever by the British Crime Writers’ Association. Despite her literary success, she dealt with personal issues. First, her mother died, and then her husband filed for divorce after falling in love with another woman. On December 3rd, 1926, following a fight with her husband, Christie left the house without saying where she was going. The next morning, her car was found abandoned, and the mysterious disappearance of the author became a news sensation. Thousand police officers and 15,000 volunteers searched for her. The author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, gave a medium one of Christie’s gloves to locate her, and a newspaper offered a £100 reward to the person who would find her. Eleven days later, Christie got recognized in a hotel in Yorkshire, where she registered under the last name of her husband’s lover. She suffered from amnesia and couldn’t recall who she was or how she got to Yorkshire. After the incident, she moved to London with her daughter, received psychiatric treatment, and divorced. In 1928, at 38, she took the Orient Express to Istanbul and then continued to Baghdad. While visiting the archaeological site at Ur, she befriended the archaeologist Leonard Woolley, who invited her back the following year. Then, she met the archaeologist Max Mallowan, 13 years her junior. After they married, she joined him on his archaeological expeditions in the Middle East, which inspired many of her stories, such as the 1934 novel Murder on the Orient Express. She continued to publish more novels and short stories, and in 1943, after she disliked a stage adaption of one of her novels, she began to adapt her stories into plays. In the early 1970s, her health began to decline. She published her last novel in 1973 and made her last public appearance in 1974. She died two years later at the age of 85. During her life, she wrote 74 novels (66 of them are detective stories), 14 short-stories collections, 19 plays, and an autobiography. Dozens of her works got adapted into films, TV series, and stage plays. Her books have been translated into over 100 languages and sold over 300 million copies worldwide. In 1976, at the time of her death, she was the best-selling novelist in history. Read more...

María de Zayas y Sotomayor was born in Madrid, Spain to an aristocrat family. Her father was an infantry captain, and growing up, the family frequently moved. Around 1632, in her early 40s, Zayas began to publish her poetry – love and satirical pieces and praise poems for various contemporary writers who were part of the literary circles in Madrid. She also wrote a play titled La traicion en la Amistad (Friendship Betrayed). In 1637, at the age of 47, she published her first novellas collection, Novelas Amorosas y ejemplares (Amorous and Exemplary Novels), and ten years later, she published her second collection, Desengaños Amorosos (The Disenchantments of Love). In the first volume, the characters are gathered together over five nights to help the leading character, Lisis, recover from an illness. In the second volume, the characters reunite in a three-night celebration for an upcoming wedding of Lisis. In both collections, most of the stories are told by women and deal with subjects of seductive men and abusive husbands. Some of the characters suffer torture, deprivation, and death from violent spouses and male relatives, and many of the female protagonists end up in a convent, depicted as a sanctuary from male abuse and as a haven of the women’s community. By writing in a realistic style, Zayas illuminated the struggles faced by women in the paternalistic society of 17th century Spain and guided her readers on how to treat women properly. During her time, Zayas’ work was welcomed with open arms, and she enjoyed the respect of her contemporaries. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, the novellas were translated into French, German, Dutch, Italian, and English. The 19th-century puritanism approach changed the perspective of her writings, observing them as vulgar and obscene. As a result, Zayas and her work were forgotten. It was only in the 1970s that feminist scholars rediscovered her, and many scholars worldwide became interested in her and her work, translating, writing papers, and essay collections about them. The interest in her increased the attention of other women writers of the Golden Age. Today she is considered one of the pioneers of modern literary feminism. Read more...

Ava Marie DuVernay was born and raised in California. She studied English literature and African-American studies at the University of California. While at college, DuVernay was interested in broadcast journalism and interned for CBS News during the O.J. Simpson trial. Following been assigned to look through the trash of the jury, DuVernay decided to change her career path and get into public relations. After receiving her Bachelor’s degree, she began to work as a junior publicist at several production studios and PR agencies. In 1999, when she is 27 years old, she opened her PR firm, The DuVernay Agency, working on campaigns for films such as Shrek 2, Dreamgirls, and Collateral. At the time, she also launched numerous lifestyle and promotional networks, including the Urban Beauty Collective for African-American beauty salons and barbershops and HelloBeautiful for millennial women of color. As a PR agent, DuVernay frequently visited film sets, observing filmmakers on the job, figuring that she can be one as well. She bought books on the art of screenwriting, and in 2003 she began to work on her first script. In the following year, at the age of 32, DuVernay directed her first short film, Saturday Night Life, based on her mother’s experiences in a discount grocery store. At 38, DuVernay released her first narrative feature, I Will Follow, about a woman who losses her aunt to cancer. The film was the official selection of several film festivals, including the American Film Institute Fest and the Chicago International Film Festival. A year later, DuVernay’s film Middle of Nowhere premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and won Best direction, making her the first African-American woman to receive the award. In the following years, she continued creating movies and TV series, winning awards as the first African-American woman. In 2018, she made history again by becoming the first woman of color to direct a live-action film with a budget higher than $100 million in the movie A Wrinkle in Time, featuring Oprah Winfrey. Between one feature film to another, DuVernay directed many TV documentary films, music videos, and commercials. She also founded the African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement (AFFRM) to support films made by black artists, later rebranded as ARRAY, expanding the movement’s mission to women artists. She also co-founded the Evolve Entertainment Fund, promoting inclusion and providing opportunities for under-served communities in the entertainment industry. Read more...

June Millicent Jordan was born and raised in NYC, NY, the only child of Jamaican immigrants. Her father, with whom she had a complex and abusive relationship, expose her to poetry and literature from a young age, and by the age of 7, she began to write poetry. Jordan attended the predominantly white preparatory school Northfield Mount Hermon School, where the teachers encouraged her interest and writing talent but did not introduce her to Black poets’ works. After high school, Jordan attended Barnard College. There she witnessed again that black history is not part of the school’s white-male curriculum. At 19, she married Michael Meyer, and the couple moved to study at the University of Chicago. Later, she returned to Barnard and earned a BA degree. In 1958, at the age of 22, Jordan gave birth to her only son, and a few years later, she got divorced and raised her child alone. At the time, Jordan had her first career success, working with the architect Buckminster Fuller on a film in which she examined the architectural and environmental impacts on the low-income Black families. In 1967, at 31, she began her 30 years career as a professor. First, at the City College of New York, and then at Sarah Lawrence College, Yale University, and University of California, Berkeley. There, she taught at the Women’s Studies and African American Studies departments and founded the Poetry for the People program in 1991. When she was 33 years old, Jordan published her first book, a collection of poems for children titled Who Look at Me, in which she described paintings of Black American artists in an intended Black English vernacular. The use of this style of language is a recurring motive of Jordan’s work. She used it as a way to legitimize it and to keep the Black community alive. During the 1970s, Jordan’s books were aimed at children and young adults, though over time, she began to publish essays, magazine columns, poetry, musical librettos, and plays. In all of her work, Jordan explored complex issues, both personal and political, from women, black and LGBT’s rights, sexuality, and single motherhood to race, class, capitalism, the educational system in the US, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Her writings evoked conversations, and her ideas and thoughts rose from the papers to the daily life of her readers and students. Throughout her life, Jordan wrote 27 books, and three more were published post posthumously. Jordan died of breast cancer at the age of 65. Read more...

Alice Ruth Moore was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the daughter of a Creole seaman and a former enslaved black seamstress. After graduating high school at 14, she attended a teacher-training program at Straight University, and at 17, she began teaching at an Elementary school in New Orleans. She became involved with activism at the Phyllis Wheatley Club and wrote for the Woman’s Era Club newspaper – the first newspaper created for and by African American women. In 1895, she published her first collection of poems, essays, and short stories titled “Violets and Other Tales.” That same year she moved to NYC, where she helped establish the White Rose Mission – a settlement house for colored girls. Furthering her education, she took courses at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University. Her writings for the Woman’s Era newspaper caught the attention of the poet and journalist Paul Laurence Dunbar, and in 1898, after two years of correspondence, she moved to live with him in Washington, DC, and they got married. Their relationship fertile their writing but was also disruptive and abusive. He raped her before they got married, and after three years of violent behavior, she left him and moved to Wilmington, Delaware. There, Dunbar taught at various institutes, including Howard High School, the Hampton Institute, and the State College for Colored Students. She never stopped studying, and at 32, she received her M.S degree from Cornell University. In 1913, Dunbar worked as the co-editor and writer for the A.M.E. Review – the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s newspaper. She met poet and civil rights activist Robert J. Nelson, and they got married in 1916. Although she was always involved in political activism, supporting the women’s rights movement and working toward the empowerment of women of color, it was only in 1918 that Dunbar-Nelson was appointed to an official role in the movement as a representative of the Woman’s Committee of the Council of Defense. In 1920, she became the co-editor of the progressive black newspaper, the “Wilmington Advocate.” In that same year, she published a literary anthology, aiming at black readers, titled “The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer.” At 45, Dunbar-Nelson was a successful and popular writer, consistently publishing articles, columns, and essays in newspapers as well as in academic journals. Dunbar-Nelson became a speaker at various events, including the 1928 American Negro Labor Congress Forum in Philadelphia. After she moved with her husband to Philadelphia in 1932, her health declined, and two years later, she passed away at the age of 60. Dunbar-Nelson is a representative of the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Her writing is characterized by complex understandings of race, gender, and ethnicity. In her work, Dunbar-Nelson explored issues that she dealt with as a woman of color, especially her mixed-raced experiences, not belonging here or there. She wrote about her perspective of education opportunity, workplace environment, and social oppression, inspiring generations of black writers to come. Read more...

Gertrude Jeannette was born in Urbana, Arkansas, where she grew up on a farm with her six siblings. During the Great Depression, the family moved to Little Rock, Arkansas. She attended the segregated Dunbar High School and planned to enroll at Fisk University. On her prom night, she met Joe Jeannette, who was 35 years older than her, and just before her graduation, the couple eloped to NYC. There, Jeannette became involved in the civil rights movement. Jeannette’s husband, a heavyweight boxer and the president of the Harlem Dusters motorcycle club taught her how to drive a motorcycle. In 1935, she became the first woman in NYC to have a motorcycle license. During WW2, the city had a shortage of taxi drivers, Jeannette took the call, and in 1942, at the age of 28, she passed the cab driver’s test and became the first woman in NYC to have a taxi driver license. With her new income, Jeannette wanted to further her education, and while attending bookkeeping classes, she took a speech class at the American Negro Theatre to correct her stammer. As part of the theater’s curriculum, Jeannette was obliged to take an acting class, which changed the course of her life. At 31, Jeannette began her acting career, landing her first lead role in the play “Our Town,” and four years later, she performed in her first Broadway production – “Lost in the Stars.” Jeannette saw the lack of authentic black characters in the theater, so she started to write her plays. Her first production, “The Way Forward,” premiered in 1950. In this autobiographical play, Jeannette depicted the life of the sharecroppers in the South. As in her other plays, she presented strong African-American characters and dealt with topics such as racism, education, politics, and family issues. In the same year, Jeannette was featured in the TV Hour production of the “God’s Trombones,” adding another first to her list as the first African-American actress to appear on National Television. Jeannette continued to appear in various Broadway productions, films, and TV shows. Her credits include titles such as “Nothing but a Man,” “Cotton Comes to Harlem,” “Shaft,” and “Black Girl.” In 1979, Jeannette founded the H.A.D.L.E.Y. Players (Harlem Artist’s Development League Especially for You), a theater company, which gave artists a place to develop their skills, enriching the cultural life in Harlem. Jeannette acted, directed, and wrote until her retirement at the age of 98. She died at her home in Harlem at the age of 103. Read more...

Ann Clare Boothe Luce was born and raised in NYC. Her mother wanted her to become an actress, and from the age of 10, she studied at Mary Pickford on Broadway, playing first in Broadway by the age of 11. At the age of 20, she married George Tuttle Brokaw, a millionaire heir who was 23 years older than her. They had one daughter before they got divorced. At 27 years old, Luce started to work at Vogue as a caption writer, and later as associate editor, managing editor, and column writer at Vanity Fair. In 1931, she published her first book, a volume of short stories titled “Stuffed Shirts.” In 1935, her first playwright, “Abide with Me,” was staged but failed. Soon after, she wrote the satirical comedy, “The Women,” with an all-female cast of 40 characters. This pioneer play was a Broadway hit and soon was adapted into a movie. Following the success, she wrote two more plays that were adapted into movies – Kiss the Boys Goodbye and Margin for Error. At the age of 32, she married Henry Luce, the publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune. In 1939, when WW2 has erupted, she traveled to Europe as a correspondent for Life magazine. In 1941, she and her husband went to China to report on the status of the war with Japan. When the US entered the war, Luce visited military installations in Africa, China, India, and Burma. In 1942, at the age of 39, Luce won a seat representing Connecticut in the US House of Representatives, the first woman from Connecticut to be elected to Congress. During her term, she called for the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, advocated aid for war victims abroad, and lobbied for issues such as infant-care, maternity appropriations for the wives of enlisted men, the Equal Rights Amendment, and the development of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. She was a member of the House Military Affairs Committee and had a pivotal role in creating the Atomic Energy Commission. She co-authored the Luce–Celler Act of 1946 to permit Filipinos and Indians permission to immigrate to the US, and she proposed a bill to create a Labor Department bureau to ensure equal pay for equal work for women and minorities. In 1944, her 19 years old daughter, Ann Clare Brokaw, died in a car accident. Dealing with the tragedy, she began to explore religion and received into the Roman Catholic Church. She did not run for re-election. When WW2 ended, Luce became a loud advocate against international Communism. During the presidential election of 1952, she campaigned on behalf of Republican candidate Dwight Eisenhower, giving more than 100 speeches nationwide. Thanks for her contribution, she was appointed as the US ambassador to Italy – the first American woman to serve in a major ambassadorial post abroad. She resigned from her position after three years due to arsenic poisoning that impacted her physically and mentally. In 1973 Luce was appointed by President Nixon to the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. She remained on the board until 1977, and then again in 1981, was appointed by President Reagan. In 1983, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the first female Congress member to receive the award. Three years later, at the age of 84, she died of brain cancer. Read more...

Julie Taymor was born in Newton, Massachusetts. Her interest in theatre began at a young age, producing family and friends’ performances in the backyard. At the age of 10, she joined the Boston Children’s Theatre, and by the age of 13, she joined Julie Portman Theatre Workshop, in which she discovered the art of “Living Theatre.” She graduated high school at 16 and went to Paris to attend the L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq. There she learned mime and developed physical sensibilities, which later she used many times in her productions. At the age of 18, Taymor returned to the US and studied folklore and mythology studies at Oberlin College, graduating with Phi Beta Kappa honors. At 22, with the Thomas J. Watson Foundation fellowship, she traveled to Japan and Indonesia, studying the local theater and art forms. She stayed in Indonesia for four years, founding the Teatr Loh – a mask and dance company with actors, dancers, musicians, and puppeteers from all around the world. In 1980, Taymor came back to the US, settling in NYC. Around that time, she met the composer Elliot Goldenthal, who became her life partner and artistic collaborator. Her career took off in New York, designing masks, costumes, and puppets for various productions, including The Haggadah, Black Elk Lives, and Savages. At the same time, she promoted several projects of her own, adapting materials into the theater and directing numerous plays, including The Tempest, The Taming of the Shrew, and Titus Andronicus. In 1997, Taymor’s Broadway production of The Lion King had premiered. Not only she directed the musical but also designed the costumes, masks, and puppets. The musical became the highest-grossing Broadway production of all time, performing in more than 12 countries and seen by over 45 million people worldwide. Taymor became the first woman to receive the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical. In 1992, at the age of 40, she directed her first opera – Oedipus rex by Stravinsky. She loved it and continued to direct one production after another, including The Flying Dutchman by Wagner, Salome by Richard Strauss, and The Magic Flute by Mozart. In the same year, she also directed her first film – Fool’s Fire. Over the years, she adapted many of her opera and theater productions into movies, such as Oedipus rex, Titus, and The Tempest. In 2002, she directed her acclaimed film Frida, depicting the life story of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Her next movie was Jukebox musical Across the Universe – a love story during the Vietnam War set to the soundtrack of The Beatles. In 2020, she released the film The Glorias, following the life of the feminist icon Gloria Steinem. Read more...

Born in NYC and grew up in Scarsdale, New York. From age 5, her father sexually and physically abused her. Her mother knew of the abuse but was scared to interfere. The molestation stopped when Ensler was 10 years old, upon his death. As a teen, she used alcohol as a coping mechanism, an addiction that continued into her mid 20’s. At 22, after graduating from college, she had a series of abusive relationships, which dragged her deep into her addiction, and she started using drugs regularly. At 24, she married Richard McDermott, who convinced her to go to rehab. The couple divorced after ten years, during that time she adopted his biological son – the actor Dylan McDermott. After she got sober, she started writing for the theater. As a survivor of sexual abuse, Ensler suffered from physical disassociation, feeling that she could not inhabit her own body. In an attempt to understand her experience, she interviewed other women about their experiences; those interviews were the basis for the groundbreaking play “The Vagina Monologues.” The play explores subjects such as body image, consensual and nonconsensual sexual experiences, encounters with reproduction, menstrual periods, and vaginal care. It became a worldwide phenomenon, translated into 48 languages and performed in more than 140 countries. Knowing for herself how it feels to be abused, she decided to dedicate her life to end violence against girls and women, and in 1998 she founded V-Day – a global movement advocating for ending gender terror. The organization founded more than 12,000 anti-violence programs all over the world. In 2011, they opened the City of Joy in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which provides a community for survivors of gender violence. In 2012, the organization, led by Ensler, created the One Billion Rising campaign, fighting for justice and gender equality for women worldwide. Over the years she wrote 12 plays and 10 books, most of them are exploring women’s perspectives of social conventions. She has also been involved in several films, including the television version of The Vagina Monologues, “Until The Violence Stops,” and “What I Want My Words To Do To You.” In her 50’s she struggled with uterine cancer, which she details in her memoir “In the Body of the World.” Read more...

Shonda Lynn Rhimes was born in Chicago, IL, the youngest of six children. She earned her bachelor’s degree in English Literature and Film Studies at Dartmouth College. While at college, Rhimes wrote for the college newspaper and performed and directed in students’ productions. She moved to LA to study screenwriting at the University of Southern California. Ranking top of her class, Rhimes granted the Gary Rosenberg Writing Fellowship. After earning her Master of Fine Arts degree, at the age of 28, she directed her first short film, “Blossoms and Veils,” starring Jada Pinkett-Smith. Then, she co-wrote the TV movie “Introducing Dorothy Dandridge,” starring Halle Berry. Rhimes’ career was on the rise, screenwriting Britney Spears’ movie “Crossroads” and working with her mentor Debra Martin Chase on “The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement”. The first series Rhimes wrote, about war correspondents, wasn’t picked up, but in 2005, she had her breakthrough when “Grey’s Anatomy” was first aired. Since its premiere, the show became a hit, going into its 16th season in 2019. While developing the series, Rhimes founded the production company “Shondaland,” which enabled her to have control of her own show. Under Shondaland, Rhimes produced other shows she created, including the “Grey’s Anatomy” spin-off “Private Practice,” the political drama “Scandal,” and the legal drama “How to Get Away with Murder.” Rhimes is also a producer of other creators’ shows, such as “For the people” and “Station 19.” When “Scandal” premiered in 2011, it became the first network drama in 4 decades to feature an African-American actress as the lead (Kerry Washington). In 2017, Netflix announced the multi-year development deal that they made with Rhimes, which is estimated to be more than $100 million. All of Rhimes’ shows are featuring strong female characters, and they all dealing with current social issues, such as race, sexuality, and gender gap. Rhimes was among the 300 women in the entertainment industry to launch the Time’s Up movement. Her point of view is reflected in her self-help book “Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, stand in the Sun, and Be Your Own Person,” as well as in the Dove’s #RealBeauty campaign, where she serves as the creative director. Read more...