Gayle Brandeis is our wordsmith extraordinaire. She crafts all of the CODEPINK Alerts that go to nearly 200,000 members weekly. She is the author of several books, and of them, The Book of Dead Birds: A Novel (HarperCollins) won Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize for Fiction in Support of a Literature of Social Change. Her second novel, Self Storage, will be published by Ballantine in 2007. Gayle's poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies (such as Salon.com, The Nation, and The Mississippi Review) and have received several awards, including the QPB/Story Magazine Short Story Award, a Barbara Mandigo Kelley Peace Poetry Award, and a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Her essay on the meaning of liberty was one of three included in the Statue of Liberty's Centennial time capsule in 1986. In 2004, The Writer Magazine honored Gayle with “A Writer Who Makes a Difference” Award.

Gayle holds a BA in “Poetry and Movement: Arts of Expression, Meditation and Healing” from the University of Redlands, and an MFA in Creative Writing/Fiction from Antioch University. She is writer in residence for the Mission Inn Foundation's Family Voices Project, and has taught at universities, libraries, community centers, and writing conferences around the country.