Forum Network

Sofia Snow will start teaching poetry for the Foundations Project at the YMCA in Hyde Park and has taught poetry workshops at Harvard University in conjunction with the hip-hop activist program Critical Breakdown. She has worked with YPACT, a peer leadership group based in Codman Square that works with at-risk youth. She performed in front of a citywide audience during the summer's Peace Fest at City Hall. She's also only 17 years old.

Steve Curwood is executive producer and host of *Living on Earth*. Steve created the first pilot of *Living on Earth* in the Spring of 1990, and the show has run continuously since April, 1991. Today, *Living on Earth with Steve Curwood* is aired on more than 300 National Public Radio affiliates in the USA. Steve's relationship with NPR goes back to 1979 when he began as a reporter and host of *Weekend All Things Considered*. He also hosted NPR's *World of Opera*. Steve has been a journalist for more than 30 years with experience at NPR, CBS News, the *Boston Globe*, WBUR-FM/Boston and WGBH-TV/Boston. He shared the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service as part of the *Boston Globe*'s education team. Steve Curwood is also the recipient of the 2003 Global Green Award for Media Design, the 2003 David A. Brower Award from the Sierra Club for excellence in environmental reporting and the 1992 New England Environmental Leadership Award from Tufts University for his work on promoting environmental awareness. He is president of the World Media Foundation, Inc. and a Lecturer in Environmental Science and Public Policy at Harvard University.

Ross grew up in New York, before coming to Massachusetts to attend Harvard University, where she obtained a BA in psychology and a master's degree in education. After this she became involved in the low-income community, and her primary activist work has been to address issues related to abolishing poverty. She has also worked on other causes from nonviolence, the environment, and international solidarity to anti-racist struggles, women's rights, union organizing and gay/lesbian civil rights. In 2006 Ross became the first open lesbian to run for the post of governor of Massachusetts. Ross lost to Deval Patrick, receiving 43,193 votes for 1.95% of the total vote. In December of that year, Ross was named "Person of the Year" by the New England gay-oriented magazine, *IN News Weekly*. Ross was an at-large candidate for the Worcester City Council in 2007. She received 6,629 votes, placing eighth out of twelve in the November election in which the top six vote-getters were elected. In 2008, Ross helped found the Massachusetts Alliance Against Predatory Lending, a coalition of over 30 community organizations, housing counseling agencies, legal services groups and others who have come together to work on the sub-prime foreclosure crisis in Massachusetts. She is also active in the Worcester Anti-Foreclosure Team.

Michelle Fine, distinguished professor of Social Psychology, Women's Studies and Urban Education at the Graduate Center, at City University of New York. Before that she taught at the University of Pennsylvania for more than a decade. Her research focuses on youth in schools, communities and prisons, developed through critical feminist theory and method.

Joao Magueijo studied physics at the University of Lisbon. He undertook graduate work and PhD at Cambridge University. He was awarded a research fellowship at St John's College, Cambridge, the same fellowship previously held by Paul Dirac and Abdus Salam. He has been a faculty member at Princeton and Cambridge, and is currently a professor at Imperial College London where he teaches undergraduates "General Relativity" and postgraduates "Advanced General Relativity". In 1998, Magueijo teamed with Andreas Albrecht to work on the varying speed of light (VSL) theory of cosmology, which proposes that the speed of light was much higher in the early universe, of 60 orders of magnitude faster than its present value. This would to explain the horizon problem (since distant regions of the expanding universe would have had time to interact and homogenize their properties), and is presented as an alternative to the more mainstream theory of cosmic inflation. Magueijo discusses his personal struggles pursuing VSL in his 2003 book, *Faster Than The Speed of Light, The Story of a Scientific Speculation*. He is also the host of the Science Channel series, *Joao Magueijo's Big Bang*, which premiered on May 13, 2008.

An award-winning poet, novelist, political theorist, feminist activist, journalist, editor, and best-selling author, Robin Morgan has published more than 20 books, including the now-classic anthologies Sisterhood Is Powerful (Random House, 1970) and Sisterhood Is Global (Doubleday, l984; updated edition, The Feminist Press, 1996); with the recent Sisterhood Is Forever: The Women's Anthology for A New Millennium (Washington Square Press, Simon & Schuster, 2003). A founder/leader of contemporary US feminism, she has also been a leader in the international women's movement for 30 years. An invited speaker at every major university in North America, she has traveled--as organizer, lecturer, journalist--across Europe, to Australia, Brazil, the Caribbean, Central America, China, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Nepal, New Zealand, Pacific Island nations, the Philippines, and South Africa; she has twice (1986 and 1989) spent months in the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, West Bank, and Gaza, reporting on the conditions of women.

US Senator Byron Dorgan was raised in the southwestern North Dakota town of Regent, where his family worked in the farm equipment and petroleum business and raised cattle and horses. At age 26, he became North Dakota's youngest ever constitutional officer when he was appointed State Tax Commissioner. First elected to Congress in 1980, Dorgan has devoted his career to fighting for the interests of rural America. Senator Dorgan served six terms in the U.S. House of Representatives and was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1992. He is a senior member of the Appropriations, Commerce and Energy committees. He also serves as Chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee and the Democratic Policy Committee. As Chairman of the Senate Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee, he has worked to fund development of renewable energy sources like wind, solar and biofuels, as well as clean coal research that will help us find better ways to use the resource that fulfill 50 percent of our nation's energy needs.

John is the Acting Director of the Public Health Preparedness office at the Boston Public Health Commission. In that capacity, he leads all planning and coordination efforts related to bioterrorism preparedness and response, including the Boston Medical Reserve Corps. John joined the Commission in 2003, and has worked in several different areas of emergency preparedness and response. As a Project Manager in the Communicable Disease Control Division, John coordinated all bioterrorism-related planning activities within the division and participated in the development and implementation of the City's ED syndromic surveillance system. As Senior Project Manager and subsequently Associate Director of the Public Health Preparedness Office, John was the central point of contact for all planning activities related to the Cities Readiness Initiative since the inception of the program. Prior to the Commission, John held various positions in the private sector as a project manager and strategic planner.