About

The official bio sounds like this:

Deborah Siegel-Acevedo, PhD is a Visiting Scholar in Gender & Sexuality Studies at Northwestern University and an educator with a penchant for creating “crossover” initiatives at the intersection of writing, community, and education. Most recently, as Inaugural Executive Director of Artists Book House, she professionalized the newly formed arts education nonprofit organization designed to help people tell their stories and transform their worlds into books.

Before that, she was the first coordinator of HumanitiesX, DePaul University’s Experiential Humanities Collaborative, where she supported diverse learning communities comprised of faculty, students, and community partners.

She is the founder of Bold Voice Collaborative, a network of creative professionals who joined during the pandemic to foster a multiplicity of public narratives, as well as Girl Meets Voice, Inc., a boutique coaching firm that helps scholars and others find and sustain their creative life’s work.

Earlier in her career, Deborah co-founded Barnard University’s online journal The Scholar & Feminist Online; founded the group blog Girl w/Pen  housed at The Society Pages; and cofounded SheWrites.com, the largest online community for women+ who write.

Deborah’s teaching credits span both the academic and non-academic worlds: She has taught personal narrative and TEDx-style speaking as an Adjunct Faculty Member in the College of Communication at DePaul University; creative nonfiction at the Northwestern University Summer Writing Conference and StoryStudio Chicago; opinion and persuasive writing at academic institutions, nonprofits, and foundations nationwide as a Fellowship Director and Senior Facilitator with The OpEd Project; author platform at the Ragdale Foundation; anthology-making at Mediabistro; and more.

Deborah is the author of Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild (Palgrave Macmillan), co-editor of Only Child (Harmony/Random House), and a TEDx speaker (“Learn from Kids to Embrace Paradox – Get Out of Your Binary Zone”). She has published essays in TriQuarterly and in multiple anthologies as well as op-eds and features on gender and politics in venues including: The Washington Post, The Guardian, CNN.com, The Forward, Kveller, Slate, The Huffington Post, The American Prospect, Ms., More, and Psychology Today. Deborah’s work has also been featured on The Today Show and in the New York Times.

Deborah received her doctorate in literary studies with a minor in feminist cultural studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she taught composition; media, politics, and culture; feminist theory; and nineteenth- and twentieth-century English and American literature. She lives in Evanston with her family, some cats, a lizard, and a visiting Great Pyrenees.

The longer story goes like this:

I graduated from college the same year Anita Hill spoke her truth about being sexually harassed by a boss. Soon after my graduation, I was hired by the National Council for Research on Women to write a report for distribution to Congress and beyond synthesizing what we knew, and what we still needed to know, about sexual harassment. That report was a stretch and a personal milestone made possible by mentoring from women who believed in me. Through that experience I learned the value of writing in collaboration. While Hill’s former boss got confirmed to the Supreme Court, national awareness of sexual harassment increased, and I saw that writing could lead to change. (I’ve since learned that change is not linear, but cyclical, as is history itself.)

When I returned to graduate school to earn my doctorate in literature, I remained fascinated by the connections between personal narrative, popular discourse, and social transformation—Anita Hill, Gloria Steinem, and Riot Grrl played a role in my studies. My dissertation—the creation of which I found painful— became my first published book, rewritten for a popular audience. The rewriting was fun.

In making the transition from academic to mainstream writing, I learned the value of translation, the joy of engaging an audience, the pleasure of stretching my genre, and the thrill of learning to write and think in different forms. (My doctoral work went from being about “the travels, rhetorical and real, of the slogan ‘The Personal Is Political’ through second and third wave feminism in the US” to being about “the fights and frenzies around feminism in America over the past 40 years.”)

Speaking across the country, both solo and on panels at venues ranging from bookstores to community centers to Harvard to the 92nd Street Y, I saw how a book could bring people together, spark conversations across differences, and ignite essential debate. A blog, second book, participation in the first cohort of the Women’s Media Center’s Progressive Women’s Voices program, and a slew of essays and op-eds later, I learned the power of the dictionary definition of “platform, ” which is: an opportunity for doing something, a raised stage. Impact felt contagious and sparked my interest in helping others find their voice and build their stage.

In 2009, with the book publishing industry changing and traditional journalism morphing, I co-founded the online community She Writes with Kamy Wicoff—designed to expand access to publishing. In 2011, I teamed up with a collective of fellow journalists at The OpEd Project, a social venture designed to diversify the range of voices narrating the world, and helped expand their programming in the Midwest. Both of these experiences taught me the role of community in fostering creativity. In 2015, I formed my own creative consultancy, Girl Meets Voice, Inc., and in 2020 I launched the popup Bold Voice Collaborative, offering online courses during the pandemic. When the world reopened, I joined forces with HumanitiesX, a Mellon-funded initiative bridging DePaul University and community nonprofit organizations. Once that was launched, I accepted the position of Executive Director at Artists Book House, founded by author and artist Audrey Niffenegger.

Writing, to me, is more than mere expression. It’s a way of enlisting others in one’s ideas. It is courage. It can be a form of intentional leadership that begins on the page but extends beyond. I believe that the more of us out there speaking our most poignant  truths and being our most authentic selves, the better it will be for our world.

Over the last several years, chugging along with my next writing project, I’ve thought back to my foundational experience of creating a report about sexual harassment in the time of Anita Hill. While the world today seems all the more broken, chaotic, and complex, the theme of that report—speaking truth to power—inspires my work still.

Some of the venues in which my work has been featured: