ABOUT

 

“Engrave this upon your heart: there isn’t anyone you couldn’t love once you heard their story.”
Mary Lou Kownacki 

Courtney E. Martin has been called “one of our most insightful culture critics and one of our finest young writers” by Parker Palmer, and her writing has been described as “varied, transformational, and necessary for us all” by Jane Fonda and “a hardcover punch in the gut” by Arianna Huffington.

Last fall, Penguin published her fifth book, Project Rebirth: Survival and the Strength of the Human Spirit from 9/11 Survivors, released in conjunction with a documentary film, called Rebirth, by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Jim Whitaker.

In fall 2010, Beacon Press published Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists, in which Courtney profiled eight young people doing social justice work on the ground.

In early-2010, Seal Press published her first anthology, co-edited with J. Courtney Sullivan, titled CLICK: When We Knew We Were Feminists.

Courtney also co-wrote the life story of AIDS activist Marvelyn Brown, called The Naked Truth: Young, Beautiful and (HIV) Positive.

Courtney’s first book, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: How the Quest for Perfection is Harming Young Women was awarded a Books for a Better Life nomination and was called “smart and spirited” by The New York Times.

Courtney is also an editor at Feministing.com, which recently won the Hillman Prize for Blog Journalism and the Columbia Journalism Review calls “head and shoulders above almost any writing on women’s issues in mainstream media.”

Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, the Christian Science Monitor, The American Prospect, The Nation, Glamour, Mother Jones, Utne, and a variety of anthologies, among other publications. Courtney has appeared on Good Morning America, The TODAY Show, The O’Reilly Factor, CNN, and MSNBC, among other major media outlets. She is also a widely sought after speaker, who gives several dozen lectures and speeches annually, at universities and events across the U.S.

The Secret Society for Creative Philanthropy, which Courtney founded in 2006, has been featured in The New York Times, Forbes, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

In addition, Courtney consults with social justice organizations throughout the nation, including the Paley Center for Media, Ms. Foundation for Women, the National Council for Research on Women, the Women’s Funding Network, The International Museum of Women, and The Women’s Therapy Centre Institute. She contributed the conclusion to the groundbreaking Shriver Report, released by the Center for American Progress.

Courtney is a recipient of the Elie Wiesel Prize in Ethics and in 2009 was a resident of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center. She was a speaker at the inaugural TEDWomen Conference in December 2010 and her talk was subsequently published on TED.com.

Courtney earned her Bachelor of Arts, summa cum laude, in political science and sociology from Barnard College, and her Master of Arts in writing and social change from the Gallatin School at New York University.

When she isn’t working, which is not nearly enough of the time, she is walking in Prospect Park, watching depressing documentaries, or creating unselfconscious dance parties with her amazing friends.