People of Wicca

Starhawk

A feminist and peace activist, Starhawk (also known as Miriam Simos) is one of the foremost voices of ecofeminism, and she travels widely in North America and Europe giving lectures and workshops, drawing on her 25 years of research and experience in the Goddess movement. Her book The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979, 1989) is currently regarded as the definitive work on modern, feminist witchcraft. Starhawk holds an M.A. in psychology from Antioch West University. She consulted on the films Goddess Remembered and The Burning Times, directed by Donna Read and produced by the National Film Board of Canada. She also cowrote the commentary for Full Circle, the third film in the same Women's Spirituality series. Many of Starhawk's works have been translated in German, Danish, Italian, Portuguese, and Japanese.

From organizing in her high school during the days of the Vietnam War, Starhawk has been active in social change movements for more than 30 years. She has participated in and helped with training and organizing anti-nuclear actions at Diablo Canyon, Livermore Weapons Lab, Vandenberg Airforce Base, and the Nevada Test Site, among others. She traveled to Nicaragua with Witness for Peace in 1984 and has made two trips to El Salvador to do ongoing support work for sustainability programs. She works on countless environmental and land use issues and was a founder of the Cazadero Hills Land Use Council in Western Sonoma County. Her focus in recent years has been the antiglobalization movement, training for and taking part in the anti-WTO action in Seattle, the anti-IMF/World Bank actions in Washington, D.C., and doing trainings in Europe for the actions in Prague.

Starhawk continues her collaboration with filmmaker Donna Read, working on an hour-long documentary on the life of archaeologist Marija Gimbutas. They have formed their own film company, Belili Productions.

Starhawk works with Reclaiming, a network of people who bring together activism with earth-based spirituality and healing, offering classes, intensives, public rituals, and training in the Goddess tradition of magical activism. She writes a regular column for theReclaiming Quarterly, and she is also a columnist on the Web for www.beliefnet.com and for www.znet.com.

She lives part-time in San Francisco, in a collective house with her partner and friends, and the rest of the time in a little hut in the woods where she practices the system of ecological design known as permaculture.

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