Rebecca Solnit is an incisive voice on topics ranging from feminism to the environment, western and indigenous history to literary criticism, and from hope and disaster to popular power and social change. She has published more than twenty books, including three collections of essays – Hope in the Dark, Men Explain Things to Me, and The Mother of All Questions – as well as a trilogy of atlases of American cities and a work of literary criticism on Eadweard Muybridge. Her memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence looks back on the formative people, places, and experiences that provided Solnit with her empowering and ever-vital notion of self, and the voicelessness that was and still is the ordinary condition of women.
In 2011, Brit Marling made an indelible mark at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival as the first female multi-hyphenate to have two films premiere side by side: “Another Earth” and “Sound of My Voice,” both of which she co-wrote and starred in. Since then, she has appeared in many other films, and Marling currently stars in “The OA,” a critically acclaimed Netflix series that she co-created. After earning a degree in economics (and a leave of absence from college to live in Havana, Cuba and direct a documentary there), Marling worked in finance before pursuing work she found more meaningful: acting and writing. Quickly attuned to the power imbalances in Hollywood, Marling focused on creating projects that would offer counter-narratives to the more common ones diminishing women’s worth. “It’s a powerful moment when courageous people begin speaking about how they have been harmed, which is a deeply difficult thing to do because it means wading through a swamp of shame you’ve been made to feel. I am inspired by them all. We should let their strength guide our way forward, which means beginning a much larger conversation about the role economic inequality often plays in rape culture.”