Andrea Devon Bertoli, Editorial Assistant
Andrea has a graduate degree in political science and women's studies,but is more interested in the kitchen and the garden. She has worked at a french bakery, an organic farm, and a café, but currently makes raw and vegan goodies at a vegetarian market on Maui, where she lives with her boyfriend. She writes about food news, vegan baking, and feminist housewife life at bakerymanis.wordpress.com
Suzanne Farrell Smith, Literature Editor & Issue Proofreader
Suzanne is the HWJ Issue Proofreader, a position that she, with her detail-oriented nature, savors. Suzanne has essays published or forthcoming in The Writer’s Chronicle, Connotation Press, Muse & Stone, Hawaii Women's Journal, In the Fray, canon magazine, and Tiny Lights. She’s working on her first book, a hybrid of psychology and memoir that chronicles her attempts to excavate lost memory. Before entering the world of writing and editing for adults, Suzanne was an elementary school teacher. She still focuses much of her attention and writing on issues that relate to children.
Anna Harmon, Contributing Editor
Anna is Contributing Editor of the Hawaii Women’s Journal and the AmeriCorps*VISTA at local nonprofit Read To Me International. Prior to moving to Hawai‘i in August 2009, Anna graduated cum laude with an English degree from Colorado College, where she was Copy Standards Director and a writer of The Catalyst, Colorado College’s student newspaper, and an intern with the Colorado College Office of Communications. Anna also spent a summer writing, editing, and photographing for The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina. After calling the foothills of the Rockies home for almost 20 years, she now resides in Honolulu, where she is enjoying dabbling in a variety of interests, from yoga and screen printing to Hawaiian words and reading on the beach.
Noël Norcross, Literature Editor
Noël Norcross grew up in upcountry Maui and currently lives in San Diego, California. In 2001, she graduated with a BA in English from Harvard University where she was awarded the Thomas Temple Hoopes Prize for her poetry thesis. In 2004, she graduated with an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University’s School of the Arts, and in 2010, she completed her PhD in English at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa. Noël has worked as an independent editor for over a decade, helping clients craft eloquent and successful personal statements for a variety of academic programs, working with scholars and professionals in diverse fields on academic articles and book chapters, and editing fiction and nonfiction pieces of all lengths. Noël also enjoys travel and contemporary dance, and is currently a yoga instructor at CorePower Yoga. www.noelnorcross.com
Jennifer Meleana Hee, Editor-in-Chief
Jennifer Meleana Hee is the editor of the Hawaii Women’s Journal, and has been published in Worldview Magazine and innov8. She is a vegan baker and cook at Kale's Natural Foods www.facebook.com/kalesnatfoods. After graduating with a degree in Psychology from Harvard University, Jennifer worked for Planned Parenthood; counseled at a residential treatment center for adolescent girls; taught English at an Alternative Learning Center and Iolani; interned at Psychology Today magazine; and was an aerobics instructor--before joining the Peace Corps. She spent two and a half years in Bulgaria working with Roma youth and for Orphan Sponsorship International www.orphansponsorship.org. Upon returning to the United States, she continued her passion for writing on various blogs and publications. She enjoys traveling, rock climbing, and discussing the pros and cons of communism with her adopted Bulgarian street dog. She currently resides in Honolulu, Hawaii. www.jennmeleana.com
Mayumi Shimose Poe, Managing Editor & Literature Editor
Mayumi Shimose Poe is Managing Editor of Hawaii Women’s Journal and American Anthropologist. Her fiction, essays, and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in American Anthropologist, Dark Phrases, Drunken Boat, Eternal Portraits, Frontier Psychiatrist, Hawaii Women’s Journal, the Honolulu Advertiser, Hybolics, the Phoenix, and Stepping Stones. She wrote the libretto for Ka’ililauokekoa, a Hawaiian opera performed in Honolulu in 2007. She lives with her husband and puppy in the San Francisco bay area. www.mayumishimosepoe.com
Kathryn Xian, Publisher
Award-winning organizer and filmmaker Kathryn Xian is the Non-Executive Director of Girl Fest Hawaii, and the Publisher of the Hawaii Women's Journal. Since 1999, she has been raising local awareness of the trafficking of women and children for sex to and from Honolulu and has influenced the passage of law with regard to sex tours and promoting prostitution. In 2004, with the help of Equality Now, she led a publicity campaign incorporating a public rally and testimonials at the State legislature which resulted in the signing of Act 82, the first law in the nation to outlaw sex-tourism. In 2008, she successfully demanded and saw pass the age defining a minor victim in Promoting Prostitution in the First Degree (in Hawaii) raise from “less than 16 years of age” to “less than 18 years of age” (Act 147). She co-founded the Rape-Free Zone Coalition, which was responsible for enacting change at the University of Hawaii on August 29th 2005 to declare its system (10 Campuses) Rape-Free Zones and requiring all managerial and executive staff to attend an anti-sexism leadership training at Girl Fest led by Jackson Katz, former member of the U.S. Secretary of Defense’s Task Force on Domestic Violence in the Military and founder of MVP Strategies; an unprecedented event in the University’s history. Xian was also awarded the 2005 Ellison Onizuka Human and Civil Rights Award by the National Education Association on July 2nd 2005 and is the recipient of the Soroptimists International of the America's Women Making a Difference for Women Award 2006. She was also one of five distinguished finalists in Glamour Magazine's Women of Your Year Awards 2009 and was inducted to Pacific Business News' 2010 Class of Forty Under 40. She is a 2010 Weinberg Foundation Fellow and one of the two Hawaii Delegates for the Vision 2020 equality project of Drexel University. In 2011, she successfully advocated for the introduction and passage of Hawaii's first labor-trafficking state law and helped pass reforms to Hawaii's promoting prostitution laws to increase penalties for pimps and institute an "end demand" penalty for repeat patrons of prostitution or "johns."
