Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz is a writer and poet, activist, scholar and teacher. A pioneer in women's studies, she taught the first such course at the University of California at Berkeley in Comparative Literature, where she earned her Ph.D. Since then she has taught all over the U.S., twice as a distinguished chair—at Hamilton College and at Brooklyn College/CUNY—and in fields as diverse as Jewish Studies, Women's Studies, Urban Studies, Race Theory, Public Policy, Gender and Queer Studies. For five years she directed the Queens College/CUNY Worker Education Extension Center in Manhattan. She currently teaches at Queens College in Jewish Studies, History and Comparative Literature, and recently taught in the Bard College Prison Initiative. Born and raised in Brooklyn, a graduate of City College/CUNY, Melanie worked in the Harlem Civil Rights Movement as a teenager, and continues to be active in progressive movements, anti-war, lgbt, feminism, anti-racism, labor. She gave up a tenured teaching position to return to New York to work against racism in the Jewish community.