Janet Biehl

Janet Biehl (b. 1953) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and educated at Wesleyan University and the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. She works as a freelance copyeditor for major book publishers and is also a translator and pen-and-ink artist.

In 1986 she met the social ecologist Murray Bookchin (b. 1921) and the following year moved to Vermont to collaborate with him. He became her mentor and partner. As a social ecologist, she wrote books and articles advocating radical democracy and an ecological reconstruction of society. After he died in 2006, she began work on his biography. "Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin" was published by Oxford University Press on October 1, 2015.

Bookchin's work has influenced the Kurdish freedom movement, for which Biehl is a sympathizer. She translates books on Kurdish issues from German into English, including "Democratic Autonomy in North Kurdistan" (New Compass Press, 2013) and "Revolution in Rojava" (Pluto Press, 2016). She is currently translating the three-volume memoirs of Sakine Cansiz, of which volume 1 is published by Pluto in April 2018.