Starhawk

Starhawk
Starhawk at a Sicilian workshop
Born	Miriam Simos (1951-06-17) June 17, 1951 (age 65) Saint Paul, Minnesota
Education	Trained with Victor Anderson and Zsuzsanna Budapest
Alma mater	UCLA, B.A. Antioch University West, M.A.
Notable work	The Spiral Dance
Awards	Samuel Goldwyn Writing Award
Website	starhawk.org

Starhawk (born Miriam Simos on June 17, 1951) is an American writer and activist. She is known as a theorist of feminist Neopaganism and ecofeminism. She is a columnist for Beliefnet.com and for On Faith, the Newsweek/Washington Post online forum on religion. Starhawk's book The Spiral Dance (1979) was one of the main inspirations behind the Goddess movement. In 2012, she was listed in Watkins' Mind Body Spirit magazine as one of the 100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People.

Starhawk was born in 1951 in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her father Jack Simos, died when she was five. Her mother, Bertha Claire Goldfarb Simos, was a professor of Social work at UCLA. Both her parents were the children of Jewish immigrants from Russia.

In high school she and fellow feminist Christina Hoff Sommers were best friends. Starhawk received a BA in Fine Arts from UCLA. In 1973, while she was a graduate student in film at UCLA, she won the Samuel Goldwyn Writing Award for her novel, A Weight of Gold, a story about Venice, California, where she then lived. She received an MA in Psychology, with a concentration in feminist therapy, from Antioch University West in 1982.

Following her years at UCLA, after a failed attempt to become a fiction writer in New York City, Starhawk returned to California. She became active in the Neopagan community in the San Francisco Bay Area, and trained with Victor Anderson, founder of the Feri Tradition of witchcraft, and with Zsuzsanna Budapest, a feminist separatist involved in Dianic Wicca.