Maria Velazquez Earley is a doctoral student at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research interests include constructions of race, class, gender, and sexuality in contemporary media, as well as community-building and technology. She has served on the board of Lifting Voices, a District of Columbia-based nonprofit that helped young people in DC discover the power of creative writing, and is on the editorial board of Femspec, an academic journal exploring feminist speculative fiction. She recently received the Winnemore Dissertation Fellowship from the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, and is presently a visiting scholar at University of Hawaii- Manoa. She has also received a fellowship from the Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity’s Interdisciplinary Scholars Program.

Maria’s poetry has been published in Expanded Horizons, Concise Delights, and Stone Telling. She has also contributed reviews to Femspec, Women in Judaism, and The Cascadia Subduction Zone, and articles to The Wiscon Chronicles V: Writing and Racial Identity and Wiscon Chronicles 6. Maria has also earned a Masters in Gender and Cultural Studies from Simmons College, and blogs for The Hathor Legacy (www.thehathorlegacy.com), a feminist pop culture blog. Her dissertation project examines the use of the body as a component in community building online, paying particular attention to the Bellydancers of Color Association, the anti-racist blogosphere, and Red Light Center, an adults’ only virtual world.