Mariah Burton Nelson is the author of The Stronger Women Get, The More Men Love Football: Sexism and the American Culture of Sports (Harcourt Brace 1994, Avon Paperbacks, 1995), that was nominated for awards by the Center for the Study of Sport in Society and the North American Society for Sport Sociology. Her first book, Are We Winning Yet? How Women Are Changing Sports and Sports Are Changing Women (Random House 1991) received the Amateur Athletic Foundation's Book Award. She is currently working on The Courage to Compete: Winning, Losing, and Intimacy in Women's Lives (William Morrow 1997), and writes the first and only nationally syndicated women's sports column, for Knight-Ridder/Tribune, that is distributed to 320 newspapers. Nelson majored in psychology at Stanford ('78), where she averaged 19 points per game on the basketball team and was the captain and leading scorer and rebounder her last three years. One rebound record is unbroken. She played for pro teams in France (Clermont-Ferrand) and the United States (New Jersey Gems). She later received a masters in public health from San Jose State University.

A former weekly columnist for the Washington Post and editor of Women's Sports and Fitness magazine, she has written for the New York Times, USA TODAY, Ms. Magazine, Glamour, Shape, Fitness, Cosmopolitan, and many other periodicals.

In her role as the nation's leading expert on gender and sports, Nelson has appeared on The Today Show, Good Morning America, The Phil Donahue Show, Larry King Live, Dateline; CBS's Evening News; Crossfire, Geraldo Rivera; The Maury Povitch Show, and hundreds of other television and radio shows. She is featured in a documentary about homophobia in women's sports called Out for a Change.

In 1988 she won the Women's Sports Foundation/Miller Lite Magazine Journalism Award. She was a finalist for the same award in 1990, 1991, and 1994. In 1994 she won the Fort Wayne Women's Bureau's Nancy Rehm Memorial Award "for honest reporting of girls and women in sports." In 1995 she was presented with the National Organization for Women's award for excellence in sports writing. In 1996 she will receive the National Association of Girls and Women in Sport's Guiding Woman in Sport Award, and will be inducted into the National Girls and Women in Sport Symposium Hall of Fame.

Nelson lectures frequently on college campuses and at conferences. She currently competes in masters swimming events (specializing in the 1500-meter freestyle; her time is in the top five nationally for her age group) and coaches her mother, Sarah Burton Nelson, who recently set two Arizona state breaststroke records for women aged 70-74.

She can be reached at: Mariahbn@aol.com.

Other Publications:

When Women Win Too Much

The Courage to Lead from the Heart

Paid To Play A Game

My Mother, My Rival, MS magazine, reprinted in "A Kind of Grace"

from this article: "Competiton is about passion for perfection, and passion for other people who join in this impossible quest. What better way to get to know someone than to test your abilities together, to be daring and sweaty and exhausted together."