About

Write-Minded Podcast Deborah SiegelThe official bio sounds like this:

Deborah Siegel-Acevedo, PhD is Executive Director of Artists Book House, the new arts education organization dedicated to the literary, book, and paper arts and designed to help people tell their stories and transform their worlds into books.

An author, teacher, and social entrepreneur, Deborah has collaborated to create several innovative multimedia initiatives at the intersection of creative expression,  community, social justice, and literature and the arts. She co-founded She Writes, the global online community for women who write; helped expand The OpEd Project in the Midwest; and helped launch HumanitiesX, DePaul University’s experiential humanities collaborative. Additionally, she is the founder of the creative consultancy Girl Meets Voice Inc., the pandemic online course popup Bold Voice Collaborative, and the group blog Girl w/Pen, housed at The Society Pages. Earlier in her career, she co-created Barnard University’s online journal The Scholar & Feminist Online.

Deborah is the author of two books, Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild (Palgrave Macmillan) and Only Child (Harmony/Random House) as well as essays published in lit mags including TriQuarterly and multiple anthologies. She is a frequent reader of personal essays at Chicago live lit events. Her op-eds and features on gender, feminism, parenting, politics, writing, and social justice have appeared in venues including The Washington Post, The Guardian, Harvard Business Review, CNN.com, The Forward, Kveller, Slate, The Huffington Post, The American Prospect, Ms., More, and Psychology Today. She has been featured on The Today Show, The Wendy Williams Experience, and in The New York Times.

An erstwhile Adjunct Faculty member in the College of Communication at DePaul University and a Visiting Scholar at Northwestern University, she has taught courses on personal and public narrative both inside and outside of university settings. She facilitated over 70 workshops nationwide as a Senior Facilitator with The OpEd Project, taught at both StoryStudio and Ragdale, and teaches creative nonfiction as a guest instructor at the Northwestern University Summer Writers’ Conference. She coached over 80 TEDx speakers and is a TEDx speaker herself.

Deborah received her doctorate in Literary Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After many years in New York City, she relocated to Chicagoland with her husband and their twins, where she can frequently be found walking along the lake.

 

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. The theme of that report—speaking truth to power—inspires my work still.

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

 

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