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Starhawk (born Miriam Simos on June 17, 1951) is an American feminist and author. She is known as a theorist of feminist neopaganism and ecofeminism. In 2013, 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 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 there, 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. The Spiral Dance 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. She wrote a book, The Spiral Dance, on Goddess religion, which she finished in 1977 but was unable to publish at first. Feminist religious scholar Carol P. Christ included an article on witchcraft and the Goddess movement in the anthology Womanspirit Rising (1979). Christ put Starhawk in touch with an editor at Harper & Row, who eventually published the book. First published in 1979, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess became a best-selling book about neopagan belief and practice. A 10th-anniversary edition was published in 1989, followed by a 20th-anniversary edition in 1999.