Clare Coss & Blanche Wiesen Cook

Clare Coss is a playwright, psychotherapist and activist, convinced that we have it in our power to create a just and safe world. “As a playwright my tools are character and dialogue, conflict and story. My imagination often leads to women characters who go where the silence is. They are drawn to confront inaction and/or tyranny; face the challenge to speak and act for justice and dignity.”

In 1971 the Berkshire Theatre Festival gave Coss her first full production—The Star Strangled Banner, about the U.S. invasion of Mexico in 1848. Her other plays include Growing Up Gothic (Theatre for the New City), The Blessing (American Place Theatre), Our Place in Time (Women’s Project), Lillian Wald: At Home on Henry Street (New Federal Theatre), Dr. Du Bois and Miss Ovington (New Federal Theatre), and Emmett, Down in My Heart (TADA!; Castillo). Her anthology of lesbian love poems, The Arc of Love (Scribner), was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. She is a member The League of Professional Theatre Women, PEN, The Dramatists Guild, and the Columbia University Seminar on Women and Society.

Blanche Wiesen Cook is Distinguished Professor of History and Women’s Studies at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her definitive three volume biography of Eleanor Roosevelt was called “monumental and inspirational…[a] grand biography” by the New York Times Book Review. Her 1978 book Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution, reprinted in 2020, was declared by Joseph Lash “a book that should stay in print forever.”

An extraordinary scholar who is also a feminist, peace and civil rights activist, she played key roles in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), and Peace Action, New York State. For more than twenty years, she produced and hosted her own program for Radio Pacifica, originally called “Activists and Agitators” (later called “Women and the World”). She appears frequently on such programs as The Today Show, Good Morning America, C-Span’s Booknotes, and MacNeil/Lehrer, where she participated in the joint PBS-NBC coverage of the 1992 Democratic National Convention. She met Clare Coss at a WILPF meeting in 1966 and they have been together ever since.