Key Publications

P.O. Box 1064
Santa Monica, CA 90406
800-735-0015
Email: KeyPubs@KeyPubs.com

For Immediate Release                                                                       Contact: Robert Moskowitz

                                                 www.RayniJoan.com

The Skinny Is A Rollicking Great Story

Author Bio

The author of The Skinny is Rayni Joan, who grew up as Roberta Joan Weintraub in Newburgh, New York during the 1940’s and 50’s. Second of three daughters, a goody-two-shoes student throughout her early grades, she coped with a difficult, abusive childhood by means of her active imagination, penetrating intuition and intelligence, and a natural talent for escaping out of her body.

Devoted to music, Ms. Joan showed great promise as a student of both guitar and piano, but stopped playing for a decade after her beloved piano teacher, Billy Johnson, was brutally murdered in an alley in downtown Newburgh. She has since resumed both instruments. In her senior year of high school, at Newburgh Free Academy, she was ranked sixth academically in her class, wrote for the city’s daily newspaper, The Newburgh News, and hosted a weekly radio show on local radio station WGNY. From her earliest years, Ms. Joan has spent a significant portion of her lifetime active in movements for social justice and peace.

Born to a lower-middle-class family, Ms. Joan determined early on to finance her own college education. She went to work in a pocketbook factory when she was 14 and became manager of a pre-teen clothing shop by 16.  Receiving a pair of prestigious scholarships enabled her to attend Barnard College. After her graduation in 1962, Ms. Joan traveled to Central America on a fellowship, and later lived and taught English in Mexico, going so far as to join the Teacher Corps and eventually earning a Masters degree in Education from Temple University in Philadelphia.

During a critical period in the early 1970s, she was part of the Liberation News Service collective, where for $35 and 10 free meals per week, she researched and wrote hundreds of news and feature articles. It was during this period that her ground-breaking feature, “Women, Fat of the Land” appeared widely throughout the U.S. In the article (June, 1970), Ms. Joan became the first public confessor to the then unheard of habit of binging and purging, later diagnosed in the 1980s as bulimia. Naturally, she balanced her confession with penetrating feminist and economic analyses. Although the word and the fact of “bulimia” were largely unknown at the time, her compelling feature story containing her stunning confession was picked up by and published on the front pages of dozens of alternative weeklies, where it struck a chord with more than a million women readers – a chord that resonates to this day, when bulimia is universally recognized as a major affliction for 4% - 7% of young women and as many as 10% of college-age women. Although her public confession was a major turning point in her life, it nevertheless took Ms. Joan seven more years to kick the habit.

Married at 34, divorced at 52, mother of three wonderful sons, Ms. Joan taught English at Queensborough Community College for ten years and worked successfully in the business world for eight. She is a graduate of the three year interfaith-ministry program at the New Seminary in New York, and a frequent officiant at “life passages” such as weddings and other significant ceremonies. Ms. Joan is now Director of the Center for Increased Consciousness, and lives happily in Santa Monica, California, with her writing- and life-partner.

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Editors: Review copies available upon request.

© Copyright 2006 by Rayni Joan

Key Publications

P.O. Box 1064

Santa Monica, CA 90406

800-735-0015

Email: KeyPubs@KeyPubs.com

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