FRESH, BOLD, & SO DEF

Ivy-league homegirl, SOFIA QUINTERO is a writer, activist, educator, and speaker. Born into a working-class Dominican-Puerto Rican family in the Bronx where she still resides, she earned a BA in history-sociology from Columbia University and her MPA from the university’s School of International and Public Affairs. After graduating, Sofia Quintero began her first career as a policy analyst and advocate. She worked for various nonprofit organizations and government agencies including the Vera Institute of Justice, Hispanic AIDS Forum, and the New York City Independent Budget Office. After years of working on diverse policy issues, however, Sofia heeded her muse to pursue an entertainment career. Determined to write edgy yet intelligent novels for women who love hip hop even when hip hop fails to love them in return, Sofía wrote her debut novel EXPLICIT CONTENT under the pen name Black Artemis. Booklist said of her debut, “Fans of Sister Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever (1999) will find this debut novel just as tantalizing…” Since then Sofia has penned two more Black Artemis novels (PICTURE ME ROLLIN’ and BURN) and, her work has been by critics of all stripes for creating stories that are both intelligent and entertaining. Sofia also writes contemporary women’s fiction under her real name. Her debut novella THE MORE THINGS CHANGE appears in FRIDAY NIGHT CHICAS the first chick-lit anthology by and about Latinas. Her novel DIVAS DON’T YIELD was published in March 2006 by One World/Random House. She is also a contributing author to the anthologies NAMES I CALL MY SISTER and JUICY MANGOS. Sofia co-founded Chica Luna Productions to identify, develop and support other women of color seeking to make socially conscious entertainment. Among other projects, Chica Luna launched The F-Word and the Popular Media Justice Tookit. The F-Word is a comprehensive filmmaking institute for women of color based in East Harlem in New York City while the Toolkit is a collection of resources that deconstructs images of women of color in popular films from SET IT OFF to I LIKE IT LIKE THAT.Sofia is also a social entrepreneur and cultural activist devoted to elevating the quality of entertainment both through her personal initiatives and business ventures. With her business partner Elisha Miranda, she founded Sister Outsider Entertainment, a multimedia production company that is developing several projects for television, film and stage including the upcoming Internet series SANGRIA STREET. SOE also co-created CONSCIOUS WOMEN ROCK THE PAGE with Marcella Runell Hall and Jennifer Jlove Calderon. CONSCIOUS WOMEN is a cutting-edge multidisciplinary curriculum that enables socially conscious educators to introduce feminist hip hop fiction into their learning environments and use it to incite social change among their students. Knopf will publish Sofia’s first young adult novel EFRAIN’S SECRET about a Latino boy in the South Bronx who goes to questionable extremes to realize his dream of going to an Ivy League college. When not working on her second YA novel SHOW AND PROVE, she is producing the web series HOMEGIRL.TV. which will launch later this year. http://www.sofiaquintero.com/