Catherine is a mother, writer and recovering academic in Toronto who traded the lecture hall for the playroom and discovered that university students and preschoolers have much the same attention span. She’s the author of HerBadMother.com, the co-founder and editor of the Bad Moms Club, the featured parenting blogger at Beliefnet, the moderator of Her Bad Mother’s Basement, a contributing editor at BlogHer, and — deep breath — the co-founder of Canada Moms Blog. In her spare time, she practices talking about herself in the third person. She’s getting pretty good at it.

She’s done some awesome stuff, including but not limited to giving birth, twice – once in a truck, almost, and with no epidural, a story that she totally plans to twist into on the back of a turnip truck with a tequila-soaked clasped in mouth by the time the boy is in his teens – meeting Grover, and being held captive on a Greek Island. She wants to do more, because there’s still Elmo, and Madagascar.

She really does believe that bad is the new good. She wrote a Manifesto. She’s that committed.

Sundry Awesome:

Her Bad Mother has been mentioned in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the American Prospect, the London Times, and sundry other publications, as well as on CNN, ABC, CBC and the BBC online. Babble.com named Her Bad Mother one of the top ten mommy blogs of 2009 in its list of the year’s Top 50 Mommybloggers, ranking it among the Best Written, Most Confessional, Most Controversial, Most Popular and – drum roll – Funniest mom blogs on the Internet. So, you know. If they say so.

Catherine’s writing has also appeared in a variety of on- and off-line publications, numerous books, and maybe one or two papyrus scrolls. She still dabbles in her academic work, which concerns women and mothers in the history of political philosophy, and that stuff almost always comes out on scrolls, which are totally more noble than the Internet, seriously. She also speaks regularly on mothering in the public sphere, blogging family life, women and blogging, and social media and marketing, sometimes all the same time. She delivered a keynote address at BlogHer in 2009 in which she burst into tears – live onstage! – but everyone said it was awesome, so she’s only *this* much embarrassed. She would totally try to not cry on your stage, if you invited her to speak. Or she’d cry on cue. You have to ask her nicely, though.

Want to meet her? She’ll be at BlogHer ‘10 in August (if you wear a tutu, she’ll hug you) (no, seriously), a bunch of other places in late August and September (details coming) and is one of the hosts of Blissdom Canada, October 27 – 29, 2010, in Toronto, which will be the best thing EVER to hit Canada since that whole Dominion thing.

Contact:

You can reach her by e-mailing her at herbadmother at gmail dot com. Messages sent by carrier pigeon are also welcome. Cookies and cupcakes should be FedExed.

Photo Credit: New York Times