I am an award-winning freelance journalist based in Brooklyn (formerly based in Providence, R.I.), an erstwhile fact-checker at Esquire, and an Adjunct Lecturer in the English Department at Brooklyn College. I recently graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in creative nonfiction from the New School, where my graduate thesis was a book-length work of narrative journalism about hepatitis C and addiction. This is not a blog, but rather a collection of some of my work.

My favorite stories are about people: people who do unlikely or awe-inspiring things, people with dreams and visions and singular voices, people and communities whose voices are marginalized or forgotten by the popular press. I have a special interest in the criminal justice system and health care for the underserved and disenfranchised, particularly HIV/AIDS. (Before I became a journalist, I worked as an outreach worker and research assistant at an HIV clinic.) I also write news and book reviews, and have been known to write enthusiastically about music, politics, contraception, and goofy antics.

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ADVOCATE>Music>Girls' Rock Rules!





Girls' Rock Rules!
Young or old, expert or beginner, any woman with music in her heart is welcome to make big noise at Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls

By Beth Schwartzapfel
May 9, 2006

“Are you ready to rock?” asks a small voice. A girl no older than 10 and no bigger than a bass guitar steps up to the microphone, looks nervously down at her notes, and proceeds to screech her lungs out. Welcome to Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls, a Portland, Ore.-based nonprofit organization founded in 2000 to “eradicate all the limiting myths about music and gender that make girls afraid to speak up, sing out, and make noise,” according to its founders. Three years ago, the organization launched a new program that’s both a fundraiser for the camp and an opportunity for women to rock out, too. Ladies Rock Camp gives women of all ages and all experience levels the opportunity to take lessons in guitar, bass, keyboards, vocals, or drums, participate in workshops such as “Rock ‘n’ Roll in Everyday Life,” form bands, and perform together. This year’s camp will be held May 5-7 at camp headquarters in northeast Portland. Participants in past years have ranged in age from a 19-year-old who graduated from the Girls’ camp to a 61-year-old whose kids signed her up “because they think she rocks,” according to organizing committee member Alexa Weinstein. “Even if you play music, and even if you play music with women, this is special,” says Weinstein, who plays with the Portland-based band Wind Up Birds and was herself a camper last year. Even someone who has never picked up an instrument before should expect to perform at the Sunday afternoon showcase. “The good thing about rock and roll,” says Weinstein, “is if something is raw and sloppy, that’s cool.”

The organizing committee and the campers are a mix of queer and straight women, according to program coordinator STS, a self-described “big flaming dyke” who played drums as part of the homocore duo The Haggard. “The queer women of Portland, they are a part of a politically activist community,” says STS, “and the expression of a lot of our political beliefs is making music the medium for self-esteem and learning about who you are and your identity and valuing yourself.”

“If there’s a woman out there who’s like, ‘that sounds like fun, but I couldn’t do that, that’s for cooler people,’” Weinstein has a message for you. “It is for you. Anyone who dreams of it, who thinks it sounds wonderful. She belongs at camp.”
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