Elaine Elinson

Elaine Elinson, a former reporter with Pacific News Service in Southeast Asia, is coauthor of Development Debacle: the World Bank in the Philippines, which was banned by the Marcos regime.

Elinson's new book, coauthored with Stan Yogi, Wherever There's a Fight: How Runaway Slaves, Strikers, Suffragists Immigrants, and Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in California will be published by Heyday Books in October 2009.

The former editor of the ACLU News, Elinson is now a San Francisco-based editor and communications consultant for a wide range of legal and social justice organizations, including the ACLU, the Equal Justice Society and the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights. She is a columnist on legal history and a book reviewer for the Los Angeles Daily Journal, and teaches classes in media advocacy at Stanford Law School and the University of California.

Elinson has a degree in Asian Studies from Cornell University and an MFA in Fiction from Goddard College (2005). She has lived in England, the Philippines, Hong Kong and Central America and speaks Spanish, Russian and Mandarin. She also enjoys conversations – albeit brief – in Tagalog, Cantonese, Portuguese and French.

She has been awarded a writing grant from the California State Library's Civil Liberties Education Project and completed residencies at Hedgebrook, the Anderson Center and Mesa Refuge. Her essay on finding solace at the library during a family health crisis was selected by the American Library Association for publication in Woman's Day, March 2009.

Elinson is the author of numerous articles on U.S. foreign policy in Asia and Central America, trade unions, and civil liberties that have been published in The Nation, San Francisco Chronicle, the Daily Journal, Rocky Mountain News, The Record (London), Svenska Dagbladet (Sweden) and other newspapers and magazines.