The Camden Conference presents Marie Tessier at the Belfast Free Library on Tuesday, October 22 at 6:30pm. Marie is a women’s engagement evangelist moderating comment to the Opinion pages of NYTimes and contributing to the TakingNote blog. Her ambition is to bring women to equal participation in news comments by the 2020 centennial of the 19th Amendment. This event is free and open to all.

Marie Tessier works at the intersection of democracy, news and interactive media as moderator of reader comment to the Opinion pages of NYTimes.com, where she is an authority on including women’s voices. She is writing a book for MIT Press, “Suffragist: Women, the Web and the Future of Democracy,” 2019. She was a women’s engagement strategist with the Coral Project, a collaborative software development project of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Knight-Mozilla OpenNews that is now owned and operated by Vox Media.

She was a Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellow, working to fulfill the civic purposes of news comments, and promote the engagement women, the news industry’s most valuable consumers. Before joining The Times in 2007, she was an independent journalist specializing in coverage of violence against women, politics, and legal and financial affairs. In addition to NYTimes.com, her work has appeared on the Women’s eNews and Women’s Media Center Web sites, in Ms. magazine, the Columbia Journalism Review, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, in other papers and magazines, and on “Marketplace” radio and National Public Radio.

She has been a regular panelist on a Maine Public Television talk show. She is an independent writer whose work has been distributed throughout the English and Arabic-speaking world.