Photo by Joan Roth

Mary Thom (left) and Suzanne Braun Levine (right) are editors of a new oral history, Bella Abzug: How One Tough Broad from the Bronx Fought Jim Crow and Joe McCarthy, Pissed Off Jimmy Carter, Battled for the Rights of Women and Workers, Rallied Against War and for the Planet, and Shook Up Politics Along the Way (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

Thom is an author, editor, and journalist who is managing editor of the Women’s Media Center website. An early and long-time editor of Ms. magazine, she now writes and consults for a number of non-profit women’s organizations, including the National Council for Research on Women. Her books include Inside Ms.: 25 Years of the Magazine and the Feminist Movement and Letters to Ms.: 1972-1987.

Levine is a writer, editor and nationally recognized authority on women, media matters, and family issues. Inventing the Rest of our Lives: Women in Second Adulthood (Viking, 2005; Plume, 2006), her second book, has generated a new conversation about the choices women make as they age. She is currently at work on Fifty Is the New Fifty: Life Lessons From Second Adulthood, to be published by Viking. She was editor of Ms. magazine from 1972 to 1988 and editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, the premier magazine of media criticism, from 1989 to 1997. She is a contributing editor to More magazine, and writes a monthly blog for the More website, which also appears on her website www.SuzanneBraunLevine.com.