Soraya Chemaly is an award‐winning writer and activist whose works focus on the role of gender in culture, politics, religion, and media. Rage Becomes Her (2018) is her conversation‐shifting book that urges women to understand their anger, embrace its power, and use it for positive change.
The Q&A portion of this event will be moderated by Carole Carmichael, former Seattle Times Assistant Managing Editor.
Through a combination of priceless stories, rigorous research, and interviews with women of all backgrounds, Rage Becomes Her argues for a fresh conception of one of our core emotions. “Anger is our natural reaction to perceived injustice,” writes Soraya Chemaly. “It is a tool like any other, which means not being proficient with it puts us at a major disadvantage, and often in harms way.”
Analyzing female anger as it relates to topics like self‐worth, objectification, pain, care, fear, silence, denial, and political authoritarianism, Chemaly illuminates how women are socialized from a young age to repress their anger, revealing the harm that this causes, and then helps them learn how to marshal rage as a tool for positive change.
Chemaly is the Director of the Women’s Media Center Speech Project which aims to curb online abuse, increase media and tech diversity, and expand women’s freedom of expression. She is also the organizer of the Safety and Free Speech Coalition, an international civil society network dedicated to expanding women’s civic and political participation.
Chemaly currently serves on the national boards of the Women’s Media Center and Women, Action and the Media, as well as on the advisory councils of the Center for Democracy and Technology, VIDA, and Common Sense Media. As an activist, she has spearheaded multiple successful campaigns challenging corporations to address online harassment and abuse, restrictive content moderation and censorship, and institutional biases that affect free speech.
After occupying various leadership positions in corporate marketing and founding her own consulting firm, Chemaly returned to her writing and advocacy work full time. Her articles appear frequently in Time, the Guardian, The Nation, HuffPost, and The Atlantic, where she speaks frequently on topics related to inclusivity, free speech, sexualized violence, data, and technology. Follow her on Twitter and learn more at sorayachemaly.com and WomensMediaCenter.com.
Carole Carmichael’s journalism career spans four decades, beginning as a reporter with United Press International in Omaha, Nebraska and rising to executive leadership as Assistant Managing Editor at the Seattle Times. Under her leadership, the Seattle Times team was recognized nationally for numerous awards including eight times by the Missouri School of Journalism for its lifestyle coverage. With a deep appreciation for good writing, Carmichael was instrumental in producing writing workshops with the Poynter Institute for her staff and Seattle’s writing community.
In 2016, she left the Seattle Times when she was awarded a Visiting Journalist Fellowship with the Russell Sage Foundation in New York to research her book on the scholarship awarded to her and her classmates upon the death of Martin Luther King Jr. In the fall of 2018, she was honored by New York University’s College of Arts and Sciences with the Alumni Achievement Award. With the encouragement of Hugo House writing coaches Theo Nestor and Ingrid Ricks, Carole is busy working on the completion of her manuscript.
