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birthday: April 18, 1970
shares birthday with: Lucretia Borgia, Susan faludi, Giacomo Carissimi, Clarence Darrow,
Felix Blumenfeld, Max Weber, Jessie Street, Catherine Malfitano,
Kathy Acker and Frances Bean Cobain.
born in: Chicago
astrological mumbo-jumbo: sun in Aries on Taurus cusp, Leo rising, moon in Virgo
chinese astrological mumbo-jumbo: double iron dog
keirsey type: champion idealist
current home base: Seattle, Washington
iq: 176
spiritual mishmosh: zen buddhist
sexual orientation: bent
relationship status: no vacancy
identifying marks: freckles, tattoos, messy red hair, clompy boots, some serious
smile lines & one small, insanely cute pug.
good habits: boxing and kickboxing, ashtanga and kundalini yoga, meditation,
vegan, vitamin and herb fiend, saint of sexual information.
bad habits: cigarettes, coffee, frou-frou cocktails, chocolate tofu pudding,
true crime novels, clutter, clotheshorsing, fish-cheats, workaholism,
cynicism, tendency to bust into song incessantly and without warning.
...I even have my own action figure. How cool is that?
and more abouts... |
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in a nutshell: Heather Corinna is the queer, rabblerousing, polymath founder and editor of Scarlet Letters, Scarleteen, the All Girl Army and Femmerotic. Her sexuality work and erotica has appeared online in numerous
venues, and in print in Viscera, The Adventures of Food, Aqua Erotica, Zaftig: Well-Rounded
Erotica, The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica (1 & 2), The Mammoth Book
of Erotic Women, Shameless: An Intimate Erotica, Giggling Into the Pillow (foreward), Issues Magazine, Penthouse and On Our Backs. Her work in sexuality information and activism has hailed accolades
from Adult Video News to the Illinois Library Association, The City Pages to Playboy, and from the Utne Reader to the Kinsey Institute. Her pioneering work in women's sexuality
on the web since 1997 spearheaded a developing trend towards a
greater diversity in the voice of erotic and sexuality work, and
put the term "femmerotica" on the map. She is a model and photographer,
a visual artist and designer, a poet, a trained classical, jazz
and folk musician, a sex educator and a former kindergarten teacher;
is a vegan, a buddhist, a kickboxer, and much too Italian for
anyone's good. Her first solo book, an inclusive, in-depth young
adult sexuality guide, is forthcoming from Marlowe & Co. in spring,
2007. She recently relocated to Seattle with a scruffy old cat
and a pug, and has performed the medical miracle of living for over 35
years on coffee, cigarettes and stubbornness.
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| Women Writers Magazine: Corinna rewrites the erotic to include a dimension of life that
is particularly neglected in this country. |
| Cliterati: Heather Corinna is one of the most influential women involved
in sex online. |
Soapbox Girls: We hereby nominate Heather as Official Erotic Photographer of
the Universe (The title of Sexiest Nude Model of All Time is also
hers if she wants it).
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| Playboy Online: Healthy, relaxed sexual ethos permeates every aspect of Corinna's
site. |
| Siren Magazine: Heather says it’s impossible to separate sex and sensuality...
she thinks separating the two causes problems. I nod my head alongside
her; yes, I say, sex and sensuality shouldn’t be separated. |
| Chris Bridges, Hoot Island: Heather Corinna is an unholy marriage between Pippi Longstocking
and Janis Joplin. |
| The Minneapolis City Pages: If you get to meet only one pornographer in your lifetime, consider
yourself lucky if it's Heather Corinna. |
| Janes Guide: This site is truly the best of its genre... it defies being
categorized because there is so little like it online. Not amateur,
definitely not mainstream pornstar, yet undeniably erotic. |
| International Herald: Heather Corinna is an American phenomenon. She is a world-class
photographer, poetess, writer, essayist, activist, model and artist
with a heart of gold. |
| Erin Ferdinand, Utne Reader: Heather Corinna is my new hero! |
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extended party mix: Heather spent the first portion of her childhood between Chicago,
a van (beaded curtains and all) and Lancaster County, Pennsylvania,
due to her father's draft dodger status. She learned to read at
twoish, and write shortly thereafter, likely out of sheer boredom.
Her mother (a young Irish-American Catholic finishing nursing
school, who would later become an epidemiologist living in Wisconsin
with her wonderfully funny female partner) worked, while her father
(an Italian-American atheist activist well practiced in hippie
subculture, who would essentially continue his life trying not
to become too jaded over the world not having been changed by
his efforts) barely kept a loose rein on her at home.
The motley crew moved back to the north side of Chicago several
years later, her parents split, and Heather spent many years as
the latchkey queen of her own kingdom, skipping from misadventure
to misadventure, writing stories and singing songs, falling in
love with The Rolling Stones and George Harrison rather precociously,
and loved school to death, though her report cards frequently
said -- year after year -- "Incredibly hard worker, very intelligent,
very creative. Talks too much."
It having been made poignantly clear that dance classes were no
place for an overly social and coordination-compromised lass,
Heather began taking music classes at a very early age, where
she found (one of) her true calling(s). Her teachers in school
quickly learned how not to call on her when an answer could be
delivered musically -- the states and capitals often turned into
a rather noisy and melodic affair when they forgot to be so cautious
-- and gave up trying to teach their classes when it became clear
Heather was going to run the show no matter what they did. Her
family time was split between her mother's apartment with numerous
wild and crazy nurses and her father's pad, with numerous wild
and crazy surrogate big sisters in the guise of girlfriends. It
was a bit unusual, but it suited Heather fairly well.
Her junior high years were a conglomeration of academic achievement,
boyfriends and girlfriends, dietary experiments, cigarette-smoking,
musical enlightenment, mad crushes, general delinquency, and adventure,
all of which usually began each day with early morning yoga sessions
with her social studies teacher.
Following a brief runaway foray in Manhattan, high school held
trials and tribulations, certainly tragedies (a few too many tragedies,
really, but they are not the stuff of which charming little bios
are made), and a whole lot of changes, but picked up when she
brushed off her knees and began at a fledgling performing arts
school, majoring in music and creative writing, and working a
bizarre variety of odd jobs to pay her tuition. There she studied
opera and jazz vocals, classical piano, the history of folk music,
composition, and American and English literature. There she informally
studied bisexuality and human anatomy, age-disparate relationships,
mosh pits and underage clubbing, the recreational use of certain
chemical compounds, independent living when one is not legally
independent, and various and sundry other subjects which were
not on the official curriculum. She also began submitting her
poetry to the public, winning a few awards and scoring a few public
readings.
Heather took a year off between high school and college to work
for the Nuclear Weapons Freeze, sing on streetcorners, play with
more chemical compounds, experiment with more forms of sexuality
and relationships, raid thrift stores and dumpster dive, and figure
out what the heck she was doing while saving up money for college.
A year later, she entered a Socratic school in northern Illinois.
There, she discovered Blake and found that erotic literature and
sexuality could parade as an actual major, became the Earth Mama
and resident folksinger and tarot reader of her tiny campus, went
through the pool of sexual partners available in short order,
taught developmentally disabled teens and adults on the side,
studied her bum off, won lots of awards that really meant nothing
in the long-run, and found out that a campus of less than 40-people
in the middle of nowhere awfully fast, so moved back to Chicago
and commuted to school.
At the tail end of college and beyond, Heather took up work at
a health food store while also working for an inner city organic
sprout farm (yes, for real), and soon set into teaching. After
a year of teaching in a suburban classroom full of depressed wealthy
children and rather anal-retentive staffers, she created her own
alternative, vegetarian Kindergarten and pre-kindergarten in the
city, which she ran by the skin of her teeth for several years
before entering into Montessori education training. During this
time, she lived with a wonderful children's book illustrator 16
years her senior, and began writing again, after several years
in hiatus, finding her work kept veering towards the sexual.
After she sabotaged that relationship horribly, ran through a
few destructive (but sometimes interesting) others, tried to teach
on a stipend that'd barely manage to feed a dog while moonlighting
with the sprouts on weekends, got screwed over royally and ended
up penniless in a basement and discovered that one cannot write
all night and then work two jobs during the day, she made up her
mind to shift to writing and sexuality work full-time, as well
as devoting herself full-time to her two (then) fledgling sites,
Scarlet Letters and Scarleteen.
The rest, as they say, is history. For now, anyway. Heather still
works her duff off night and day with the sites and freelance
work, barely scrapping out a living, but happy to be doing what
she loves best. She last lived in an apartment in Minneapolis
whose three flights of stairs made for an awfully nice gym, and
where she was the resident caretaker and handychick, until, on
a rather unexpected whim, she jettisoned herself and her stuff
across the country to Seattle where she lives in a 100-year-old
house in the Ballard neighborhood with a very strange, albeit
charming, man who used to do comics and now writes, makes movies
and puta away even more coffee and booze than she does. And she
does what she can to bring her strange self, rather unusual upbringing,
and fairly unorthodox views and priorities to the world in small
enough doses that no one yet seems to have developed hives.
Over the years, Heather hasn't changed much. She is still the
latchkey queen of her own kingdom, reads and writes incessantly,
gets mad crushes, smokes too many cigarettes, plays resident Earth
Mama, runs from the anal-retentive throng, often starts her day
with yoga or boxing, lives for a good dumpster dive, scraps out
a living doing that which is most important to her though often
pays little to nothing, and is an incredibly hard worker, who
is one creative little smartypants. She still talks too much.
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