About the Author

Rachel Storm is the Managing Director of Four Walls and a Roof Project, a non-profit working to establish sustainable emergency housing for survivors of domestic violence in the Andean region of Ecuador. Rachel is the co-founder of Interfaith Atheists, Agnostics, and Humanists–a campus organization comprised of secular humanists who advocate for religious tolerance and interfaith collaboration–and a Board Member of Interfaith in Action, a campus chapter of Interfaith Youth Core. By day, Rachel works full-time as the Program Coordinator of the Women’s Resources Center at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (where she is also a PhD student in Educational Policy Studies), charged with organizing events and programs that improve the campus climate for women and encourage awareness of women’s issues and gender-related concerns.

As an activist, Rachel is the Founder of the Gender Action Network at the University of Illinois, an umbrella organization of activists and organizations working for gender empowerment, and a member of a variety of local organizations including: C-U Citizens for Peace and Justice, Amnesty International, League of Women Voters of Champaign County, National Organization for Women, Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort, Social Action Committee of the Unitarian Universalist Church, and  Students for a United Illinois, among others. Rachel works as a Rape Crisis hotline volunteer and medical advocate and is a certified teacher in theOur Whole Lives Comprehensive Sex Education Program for grades 7-10.

Rachel identifies as a white able-bodied queer humanist/feminist who, depending on the context, may use any number of the following to further capture her identities: pansexual, white, class-privileged, atheist-agnostic, Unitarian Universalist, sex-positive, kink-friendly, body-positive, writer, interfaith, socialist, anarcafeminist, riot grrl, secular humanist, educationally-privileged, poly-friendly, cat-lover, first-generation college student, poet, etc.

In her words, “I tend to recoil in the face of the black and white (outside of aesthetics, that is) and I am a skeptic of simplicity. When I am at my most lost, my most paralyzed, I feel I’m closer to making sense of things. It is that sense of disembodiment that is at once disengaging and illuminating. My project is to plunge myself into the depths of complexity with the faith that I will emerge less “whole,” less “authentic,” less “dimensional.” I speculate many of the answers we seek lie sleeping in Emily Dickinson’s dashes.”