Batya Weinbaum (born Betty Susan Weinbaum in 1952) is an American poet, feminist, artist, editor, and professor. She founded Femspec Journal, and has published 17 books, over 500 articles, essays, poems, reviews, and pieces of short fiction in various publications. Biography Weinbaum was born February 2, 1952, in Ann Arbor, Michigan and spent her childhood in Terre Haute, Indiana. Her parents, Barbara Adele Hyman and Jack Gerald Weinbaum, were active in the civil rights movement and the presidential campaigns of John F. Kennedy. Weinbaum participated in the 1971 May Day protests in Washington, D.C., during which over 7,000 people were arrested. In the late 1970s, Weinbaum voiced feminist views in several articles published in political journals. These included "The Other Side of the Paycheck: Monopoly Capital and the Structure of Consumption," co-authored with Amy Bridges in Monthly Review, "Women in the Transition to Socialism: Perspectives on the Chinese Case," in Review of Radical Political Economics, 1976 and "Redefining the Question of Revolution," in Review of Radical Political Economics, 1977. In 1984, Weinbaum briefly stayed at a commune known as Twin Oaks. Her essay on this experience became a chapter in Rudy Rohrlich and Elaine Hoffman Baruch's book, Women in Search of Utopia: Mavericks and Mythmakers In the early and mid-80s, she attended the Michigan Women's Music Festival and worked on the crew. She wrote the proposal that founded the alternative healing space, Oasis, with Kristi Vogel as a result of activism of alternative healers. From 1984 to 1986, Weinbaum met and taught courses with Dr. Liz Kennedy at SUNY Buffalo. Her association with Kennedy helped decide Weinbaum's multicultural approach to her academic direction. In 1997, Weinbaum founded a feminist journal, Femspec, an interdisciplinary journal dedicated to science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, surrealism, myth, folklore and other supernatural genres and continued as editor-in-chief. 2013-2020, she had been operating a feminist art installation project on Isla Mujeres, Mexico. In 2014, she bought land in Floyd, Virginia where she developed a feminist educational retreat. After working in Carpinteria at the Pacifica Graduate Institute she wrote a column on transformational palmistry for the Santa Barbara Independent and subsequently published two books based on this column called Opening Palms, and On the Palmist's Road. Academic career From 1998 to 2003 at Cleveland State University, Weinbaum taught courses in multicultural literature including other genres, such as theater, poetry and performance art, as well as courses on