America the beautiful

Kathleen Thompson is an author and activist, born on September 12, 1946 in Chicago, Illinois. She grew up in Oklahoma City before relocating to Chicago at the age of nineteen. Her first book was Against Rape, a feminist classic co-authored with Andra Medea and published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in 1974. She then wrote more than a hundred books for children and young adults, mostly nonfiction. She also co-founded The Commons Theatre in Chicago and had eight plays produced there and in New York and other cities. In 1994, she collaborated with psychologist Diane Pinkert Epstein on an expose of the American diet industry, Feeding on Dreams (MacMillanUSA). Her next book was A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America (Broadway Books, 1996), co-authored with pre-eminent black woman historian Darlene Clark Hine. That book was followed by three visual histories with Hilary Mac Austin: The Face of Our Past: Images of Black Women from Colonial America to the Present (Indiana University Press, 1999); Children of the Depression (Indiana University Press, 2000); and America's Children (W. W. Norton, 2001).