Steph Auteri is a journalist who has written for the Atlantic, Pacific Standard, VICE, and elsewhere. Her more literary work has appeared in Poets & Writers, Creative Nonfiction, Southwest Review, and other publications. Her reported memoir, A DIRTY WORD, came out in 2018. She is the founder of GuerrillaSexEd.org. Favorite Genres: horror, comics, horror comics, and narrative journalism.
Baking By Feel - whisk dusted in flour
Blog, Book Reviews, Bookish Life

Baking While Bitter: A Test Drive of the Baking By Feel Cookbook

The day I made Becca Rea-Tucker’s chocolate espresso shortbread was five days after my cousin passed away. In four days, I would drive south for 11 hours in order to be with extended family and to attend a celebration of his life. But that day, in the in-between time? I was lost. Why not bake? […]

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On Being an Angry Woman - woman flings her hands up as she yells at a person who's covering their ears
Blog

On Being an Angry Woman

I have chronic depression and anxiety, so I am no stranger to being swept away by waves of overwhelming emotion or flattened by mood-related exhaustion. But these past few years have seen me overcome by another emotion that had not previously been at the forefront: all-consuming anger. It was maybe midway through 2020 that I

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The Cherry Robbers by Sarai Walker | book cover | cherry blossoms crisscrossed with a rifle against a deep blue background and with bright yellow text
Blog, Book Reviews

The Cherry Robbers and Heteropatriarchal Control

(cw: marital rape, suicide) I’m such a sucker for a floral book cover, and the cover for Sarai Walker’s The Cherry Robbers does not disappoint. Cherry blossoms splay themselves out across a lush, deep blue background, one long stem crisscrossed with a rifle. Bright yellow text floats on top. It’s gorgeous and eye-catching and it’s

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defamation lawsuits - white woman signing paperwork
Blog, Social Justice

How Defamation Lawsuits Are Used to Silence Victims

I never intended to write about the Amber Heard/Johnny Depp defamation lawsuit. With the media circus that occurred around the trial—the pile-on against Heard made up of TikTok memes and Twitter threads, death threats and other forms of denigration because she didn’t fit the mold of the “perfect victim”—I didn’t want to touch this topic

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photograph of an unhappy child resting on a stack of books, surrounded by an aqua border
Blog, Social Justice

How Anti-LGBTQ+ Legislation Co-opts the Language of Anti-Violence Advocates

Just last month, I hopped onto a meeting of the Sex Education Alliance (SEA) to talk about the most recent onslaught of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation sweeping across the U.S. The Alliance is a membership organization for sex educators who are focused on family and child education and we spend a lot of time supporting each other

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