M. G. Lord’s latest book, coming in 2011, is The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice. She is also the author of Astro Turf, a family memoir about Cold War aerospace culture, and Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll. With Shannon Halwes, she is co-writing the libretto for composer Laura Karpman’s One-Ten, an opera commissioned by the L. A. Opera about the 110 Freeway on its 70th anniversary. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review and that paper’s Arts & Leisure section, and her work has also appeared in such publications as Travel & Leisure, Discover, Vogue, the Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, and The New Yorker. A graduate of Yale, Lord was for twelve years a syndicated political cartoonist and columnist based at Newsday. She teaches in the Master of Professional Writing Program at USC.