Jodie Patterson is a social activist, entrepreneur, and writer. She has been lauded for her activist work and sits on the board of a number of gender/family/human rights organizations, including the Human Rights Campaign. Her newly published book, The Bold World: A Memoir of Family and Transformation was inspired by her transgender son and explores identity, gender, race, and authenticity to tell the real-life story of a family’s history and transformation.
Who am I in this world? I began to think. What does it mean to be a woman? Is it my body, my mind, or my spirit? Or maybe it is defined by the power I wield.
By the time I entered my senior year, I was fully exploring — crisscrossing barriers and mixing references, pulling from all the women I had read about — Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Maya Angelou, Lorraine Hansberry, Audre Lorde — and those I was getting to know at school. …
Troy is a town of about 49,000 people situated in the umbrella of the Capital Region in upstate New York.
By Sandy Soohoo
It sits at the bottom of a hill on the banks of the Hudson and was built with the money that came in from the steel mills and other industries that made Troy one of the area’s wealthiest towns at the turn of the century. Its downtown is full of brownstone-lined streets and Art Deco accents, with an impressive array of Tiffany stained-glass windows throughout. It’s like an elegantly designed movie set that’s been left behind to collect dust in a corner of a long-forgotten lot. And yet.
Situated within this rough-edged gem of a town smack…
A Peek Inside Bartlett House’s Women-Run Kitchen
Whether on the sound stages of Hollywood or in the intense, fast-paced, real life world of commercial kitchens, it’s rare that women run the back of the house — and exceptionally rare that they dominate it. In recent history, among restaurant executive chefs and James Beard winners, women are outnumbered about five to one. That’s why Nicole Craft’s majority-run kitchen staff at Ghent’s Bartlett House has given us something to chew on.
“I am metropolitan.” That’s what Nicole Craft declared to herself when she decided, in her early 20s, to move from her home state of Oklahoma…
Interview With New York Lieutenant Governor Kathy Hochul
New York’s 77th lieutenant governor, Kathy Hochul, talks with DVEIGHT Executive Editor Michael Mundy about the COVID-19 crisis, how it affects our region, and the steps she is taking, along with Governor Cuomo, to flatten the curve.
Michael Mundy: Thank you so much for doing this. First of all, we have to say that we really value what you, yourself are doing along with the governor. It’s been the most comforting news we get each day coming from the governor. So everyone in New York really appreciates it, but especially everyone here in our area.
Kathy Hochul: Well, thank…
Lacey Schwartz Delgado has spent most of her life in the Catskills. Her parents met in Sullivan County; she grew up in Ulster County; and, after leaving home to study at Georgetown and Harvard, she came back to Rhinebeck to raise a family of her own. Now the mother to twin boys, the wife of New York #19’s newest House of Representatives official, Antonio Delgado, and a celebrated film director and producer, Schwartz Delgado is a New York force to be reckoned with.
Interview by Alexandria Haechler
Tell me about your experience growing up upstate.
To me, the Catskills are home through and through. My family lived in Accord for the first ten years of my life in a space that was beautiful, but you couldn’t see any other house from our property, so it was very isolated. We moved to Woodstock when I was ten, and because I had been going to summer camps and Hebrew school there from a young age, it felt like we were coming home to the community that I grew up with.
Woodstock is such a vibrant…
In a rent-controlled apartment high up in Manhattan’s Washington Heights, Nina Burleigh and her dog, Chili, are performing a duet at the piano of “Fly Me to the Moon.” To be fair, Chili’s contribution is less America’s Got Talent and more Hound of the Baskervilles, but it’s funny and charming and makes us laugh like kids. Chili is a short-haired black-and-white Mexican mutt brought back to the U.S. after he befriended Burleigh and her family at a gas station near San Miguel de Allende. Something about that vulnerable bundle of fur crept under Burleigh’s skin that day — she’s always had a sympathy for the underdog, which limns so much of the writer’s life. The result is that we’re here now, a decade later, with Chili eviscerating Frank Sinatra at a piano in Manhattan
Burleigh being Burleigh, which is to say the kind of writer who is forever chasing a story, she wrote about Chili’s rescue for Hemispheres, the United Airlines magazine. Although she works as national politics correspondent for Newsweek, she has a freelancer’s feral energy, endlessly sweeping the horizon for whatever adventure is next. Thoughts and observations tumble from her, fragments of ideas waiting to become articles, columns, books. She is in love with the elsewhere, be it Italy or France, where she has lived for long periods at a time, or Baghdad, where she spent six months as…
Design*Sponge Founder Gracey Bonney Prefers Substance Over Style
I wasn’t surprised when Design*Sponge founder Grace Bonney told me that she grew up wearing Laura Ashley. Though I grew up in Michigan more than a decade before Grace, who was born and raised in Virginia Beach, something about her sensibilities has always felt deeply familiar to me. …
Secretary to the Governor Melissa DeRossa tackles societal inequity through legislative reform; fifth-generation Hudson Valley farmer Cheryl Rogowski connects her community with the land and with each other; 90-year-old pioneer feminist Reszin Adams looks back at a legacy of activism; and 18-year-old environmentist Iris Fen Gillingham takes up the torch to protect the Catskills’ air, water and soil. These four New York neighbors are taking the world into their hands.
Iris Fen Gillingham, Enviromentalist
When Iris Fen Gillingham arrived at college at 16 years old, it was the first time she had a flush toilet. “I grew up off of the electric grid on a farm in the Catskills. I remember my brother asking why we couldn’t have snacks in the cabinet and my mom answering, “Well, we have a whole garden outside. Go and pick something.” I got to learn what it means to live consciously with the land and I am so grateful for the perspective I have on the basic skills it takes to live,” she says. “It is something that…
Up Close With Documentary Film Director Kelly Teacher
Syrian refugees. DACA recipients. Hillary Clinton. These are just a sampling of the trending political subjects you’ll see on any given day in America. They’re also the subjects that documentary filmmaker Kelly Teacher pursued, produced, and directed during her time working on the first-ever video team at Condé Nast’s Teen Vogue.
During that one political election season we’ll never forget, Teen Vogue unveiled their short-lived but impactful series, “Ask A,” to unearth misconceptions about female minorities through intimate interviews. In one video we see Syrian teens muse on what being American means to them. In another, a…
A Conversation With the Lieutenant Governor of New York
Interview by Michael Mundy
Throughout her career, as an attorney, as a U.S. congressional representative, and now as New York’s 77th lieutenant governor, Kathy Hochul has championed women’s rights. Her motivations have always been personal: Growing up in a working-class Irish Catholic family in Buffalo, she saw her own mother defer her college education and aspirations. She now wants to ensure that all women have access to equal rights and opportunities. Here, she talks to Michael Mundy about the fight for reproductive rights, fair pay, and the next wave of women activists who are changing the political future.
Michael Mundy…
