About

I’m a full time web developer for BlogHer, coding in php and python. With my team there I help to maintain and update a large complicated bleeding-edge Drupal installation. I am also the 2nd tier tech support for over 2,500 bloggers who use WordPress, Blogger, and Typepad in our publishing network, BlogHerAds. I like to speak at conferences and I love to teach.

I am also a writer, blogger, poet, and literary translator.

I recently moved onto a houseboat and got into kayaking.

On and off, since 1993, I have used a wheelchair or a cane and crutches and so I think a fair amount about disability politics and the social construction of disability.

This is a blog about computer stuff, poetry, activism, gender, and translation — not necessarily in relation to each other. Whatever I’m thinking about that’s very thinky. It evolved from my original web site, “Bookmania!”, where I reviewed every book I read from 1995 onwards. I have read quite a lot of world literature, as well as science fiction, fantasy, history, women’s history, and poetry.

I also write about parenting on Badgermama. Other blogs and wikis where I write (and that I help maintain) Geek Feminism, Feminist Science Fiction, and Hack Ability. If you like poetry, and the poem “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg, you might enjoy the site I made for “Beep“, a parody of Howl by Santa Cruz poet Len Anderson. I have some fairly interesting posts that I wrote while I was the open source community developer at Socialtext, mostly about the event I ran for them, Wiki Wednesday.

My much more personal rambly blog is on Dreamwidth — a very cool open source project where I’ve also fixed a few bugs. In 2009 I was on the Systems team for the Organization for Transformative Works, another great open source project that is an especially friendly environment for women. I’m a member of the Carl Brandon Society to celebrate science fiction by people of color, and have been the jury chair for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award for speculative fiction that explores and expands concepts of gender.

If you want to know more about what I think about writing, and this blog isn’t enough, here’s some long interviews with me from Mommybloggers.com,
What Are You Working On, and Reading the World – E-Panel of Literary Translators.

Contact me through email, lizhenry@gmail.com, @lizhenry on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.