Featured Guests
Zakiya Luna
Luna is Associate Professor of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of Reproductive Rights as Human Rights: Women of Color and the Fight for Reproductive Justice (NYU Press, 2020), which highlights the often-forgotten activism of women of color who are largely responsible for creating what we now know as the modern-day reproductive justice movement.
Natalie Lira
Lira is Associate Professor of Latinx Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her book Laboratory of Deficiency: Sterilization and Confinement in California, 1910-1950s (University of California Press, 2021) uses reproductive justice as a critical framework for understanding the history of sterilization abuse in California.
Laurel Flores Fantauzzo
Fantauzzo is an essayist and author of My Heart Under Water (Harper Collins Press, 2020), an adult novel about a queer Filipina American teenager, and The First Impulse (2017), a nonfiction story about love and mystery.
Shui-yin Sharon Yam
Yam is Associate Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies at University of Kentucky. Their book Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship examines how three transnational groups—mainland Chinese maternal tourists, Southeast Asian migrant domestic workers, and South Asian permanent residents—engage with the existing citizenry and gain recognition through circulating personal narratives.
Samira Mehta
Samira K. Mehta is an Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies and the Director of Jewish Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research and teaching focus on the intersections of religion, culture, and gender, including the politics of family life and reproduction in the United States. Her first book, Beyond Chrismukkah: The Christian-Jewish Interfaith Family in the United States (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), was a National Jewish Book Awards finalist.
Elizabeth O’Brien
O'Brien is Assistant Professor in the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Her book Surgery and Salvation: The Roots of Reproductive Injustice in Mexico, 1770-1940 (UNC Press, 2023) traces the long and troubled history of gynecology and reproductive violence alongside Spanish colonial expansion into Mexico over the course of three centuries.
Lyz Lenz
Lyz is a New York Times bestselling author, whose writing has appeared in The Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, The New York Times, and others. Her book God Land was published in 2019, through Indiana University Press. Her second book Belabored, was published in 2020 by Bold Type Books. Lyz’s essay “All the Angry Women” was also included in the anthology Not that Bad edited by Roxane Gay. Her third book, This American Ex-Wife, published in 2024, was an instant New York Times best seller. She is also the host of the This American Ex-Wife podcast.
Siri Suh
Suh is Associate Professor of Sociology at Brandeis University and the author of Dying to Count: Post-Abortion Care and Global Reproductive Health Politics in Senegal (Rutgers University Press, 2021), which examines the how health workers, health officials, and NGO workers strive to demonstrate the intervention’s effectiveness in reducing maternal mortality despite a lack of rigorous statistical evidence.
