Melissa Etheridge is an unparalleled singer-songwriter, guitarist, author, and activist who has been making irresistible blues-rock albums for over 30 years. She was a bit of an underground sensation when she first got started in the late ‘80s, but in 1993, everything changed when she released her breakthrough fourth album, Yes I Am. It spent 138 weeks on the Billboard charts thanks to the monster hits “I’m The Only One,” and “Come To My Window,” it went platinum, and then it went on to sell more...

Dr. Brittney Cooper is an incredibly engaging and insightful feminist author, professor, activist, and cultural critic currently teaching at Rutgers University. She is also cofounder of the Crunk Feminist Collective, a scholar-activist group for feminists of color that began as a super-popular blog and has now evolved into the thriving Substack newsletter, The Remix. In 2017, she co-authored and edited The Crunk Feminist Collection anthology and also released Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women, which she followed up with her acclaimed 2018 book...

  Danielle Macdonald has been lighting up screens large and small with her plucky personality and big-girl badassery for the last decade. She’s Australian, but you’d never know it based on her spot-on 2017 performance as Jersey rapper Patti Dombrowski in the indie hit “Patti Cake$,” or by her star turn in 2018 as a Dolly Parton-obsessed Texas teen in “Dumplin'.” She’s also had notable roles in “Bird Box,” “Skin,” and “Unbelievable” just to name a few. And now, she’s back with another starring role as...

Lydia Lunch is a true radical in every sense of the word. A high priestess of punk, she arrived in New York when she was just 16 in the mid-’70s and made a name for herself downtown with her band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. That group became synonymous with the hugely influential No Wave movement and launched Lunch’s multifaceted career of over 40 years as an actor, performance poet, writer, public speaker, solo artist, and frontwoman for her subsequent bands 8-Eyed Spy, 13.13, Shotgun...

Natalie Morales is an accomplished actor best known for her work on Dead to Me, The Little Things, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Abby’s, and Parks & Rec among her many credits. But this year, she also emerged as an exciting feature film director with an incredibly relatable and undeniably feminist point-of-view. First, she released the teen road trip comedy Plan B in May on Hulu, about two high school girls who have a wild adventure trying to get their hands on the morning-after pill in...

  Lauren Fensterstock is a sculptor and installation artist whose sparkling, intricate creations look like secret treasures stolen from a gothic witches’ cathedral or like the charred remains of a fairy swamp. Made from materials including glass, vintage crystal, quartz, obsidian, onyx, hematite, shells, sand, plexiglass, paper, charcoal, and wood, her most recent installations—like the one on display at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery in D.C. earlier this year—are enormous, completely black, and suck all the surrounding light into the curves and edges of...

Gates McFadden has been sci-fi royalty for over 30 years. Best known for playing Dr. Beverly Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation—both on TV from 1987 through 1994, and in four feature films—she also worked with Jim Henson as a choreographer and director of puppet movement, most notably on Labyrinth with David Bowie. For many years, she taught in university theater departments across the country and was the Artistic Director of the Ensemble Studio Theatre in Los Angeles. And now, she‘s hosting the riveting...

Jessica Hopper is one the most insightful rock critics working today. A long-time contributor to the Chicago Reader; she’s been a columnist for The Village Voice, Chicago Tribune, and Punk Planet; the music consultant for This American Life; the editorial director for MTV News; and a senior editor at Pitchfork and Rookie. For over 20 years, she has consistently been covering women in music who women care deeply about through a feminist lens, from Liz Phair to M.I.A. to Janelle Monae to Hole to Bjork...

 Ann Wilson is lead singer and songwriter of the band Heart, which she has fronted for over 40 years with her sister Nancy, earning them a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The first hard rock band fronted by women, Heart has sold over 35 million albums, and their hits, including “Barracuda,” “Crazy On You,” and “Magic Man,” are undisputed classics. As a solo artist, Ann released the  2007 album Hope & Glory and 2018’s Immortal, along with multiple singles. And this...

Iliza Shlesinger is an award-winning comedian, actor, writer, producer, and author who earned her massive fan base by doing tons of touring all over the world. In 2008, she became the first woman to ever win NBC’s Last Comic Standing, she’s had five Netflix comedy specials and her own Netflix sketch show, and she’s currently finishing her second book, hosting the podcast Ask Iliza Anything, and developing multiple TV projects while traveling once more on her new “Back In Action” tour. On June 23, she...