The brilliant, hilarious, wildly enthusiastic, feminist author Gina Barreca stormed the Bunker this week to talk about her latest edited collection, Fast Funny Women. There’s no way to encapsulate Gina in a few sentences: a Ph.D, a member of the Friar’s Club, author and editor of twenty-one books, and television pundit and expert.
So, obviously, she and Brad talked about growing up working class, finding your voice, teaching, and the joy of storytelling (and laughing).
About Gina Barreca
Hailed as “smart and funny” by “People” magazine and “Very, very funny. For a woman,” by Dave Barry, Gina Barreca was deemed a “feminist humor maven” by Ms. Magazine. Novelist Wally Lamb said, “Barreca’s prose, in equal measures, is hilarious and humane.”
Author of ten books and editor of eleven others, her works have been translated into several languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, and German.
She’s appeared, often as a repeat guest, on CNN, PBS, the BBC, 20/20, 48 Hours, the Today Show, NPR and Oprah—as well as just having been interviewed on camera as for the forthcoming “American Masters” series on Mae West—as an expert on women, humor, and cultural politics.
One of the first women to graduate from Dartmouth College in its early years of coeducation, she was the first woman to be named Alumni scholar by that college; her papers have been requested by Dartmouth’s special collections library. She was a Reynolds’s Fellow at New Hall (now Murray Edwards) College at Cambridge University and received her Ph.D. at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
The only full-time female academic to be a member of the Friar’s Club, Gina’s also an honoree of the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame. She’s been awarded four honorary degrees and is a sought-after speaker for both the academic and non-academic groups. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Independent of London, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Cosmopolitan and the Harvard Business Review. She lives with her husband Michael in Storrs, CT. She keeps busy.
Books
- Fast Funny Women
- if You Lean In, Will Men Just Look Down Your Blouse?”: Questions and Thoughts for Loud, Smart Women in Turbulent Times
- They Used to Call Me Snow White…But I Drifted: Women’s Strategic Use of Humor
- I’m with Stupid: One Man. One Woman. 10,000 Years of Misunderstanding Between the Sexes Cleared Right Up
- It’s Not That I’m Bitter…: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Visible Panty Lines and Conquered the World
- …and the other books
