Mercilee M. Jenkins San Francisco State University, USA

Mercilee Jenkins (Ph. D in Speech Communication, University of Illinois) is a professor in the Department of Speech & Communication Studies at San Francisco State University. Her publications include her solo performance texts, poetry, and scholarly articles on women’s small group communication, the performance of personal narratives, and communication in the college classroom. She was an Associate Editor for Queer Words, Queer Images edited by R. Jeffrey Ringer. Her ethnographic research on gender, sexuality and relationships has resulted in several produced plays, including A Credit to Her Country, based on the oral histories of lesbian in the U. S. military and She Rises Like a Building to the Sky, about the founding of the San Francisco Women's Building. She received two Horizon Foundation grants for Credit and a San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grant for the development of She Rises.  Her solo performance piece, Menopause and Desire, premiered at the San Francisco Fringe Festival in September 2002 and was published in its entirety in Text and Performance Quarterly in July 2005. Dr. Jenkins received the Leslie Irene Coger Award for Distinguished Performance from the National Communication Association in 2004.