Deborah Siegel-Acevedo, PhD is the founder and principal of GIRL MEETS VOICE  INC, a boutique coaching firm for individuals and organizations on a mission to make change through words. She brings to this work a background in narrative studies and experience spanning academia, journalism, communications, and social entrepreneurship. 

After more than a decade as a content consultant for social enterprise and nonprofit organizations in New York City, where she co-founded the global online network She Writes and helped expand The OpEd Project, Deborah trained with CTI and became a certified coach through the International Coach Federation. She has since coached college presidents and deans, senior communications professionals at Fortune 500s, nonprofit leaders, new and established authors, and some of the nation’s most innovative thinkers, helping those with powerful insights put their best public selves forward in the service of their brightest ideas.

A serial creator and founder, Deborah has furthered multiple ventures at the intersection of education, writing, and community. During the pandemic, she founded Bold Voice Collaborative, a pop-up collective dedicated to transforming lives through expression through online courses and consulting. She both helped establish and was speaker coach for TEDxDePaulUniversity for seven years. She helped launch and coordinate DePaul's public humanities fellowship HumanitiesX. She earlier founded the group blog Girl w/Pen (housed at The Society Pages, a publishing endeavor supported by W.W. Norton), and co-founded the webjournal The Scholar & Feminist Online (housed at Barnard College).

Mentor, champion, and guide, Deborah herself is an author (Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild / Palgrave Macmillan; Only Child / Harmony/Random House) and a TEDx speaker and coach. Her writing has been featured in venues including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, CNN.com, Harvard Business Review, The Forward, Kveller, Slate, The Huffington Post, The American Prospect, Ms., More, and Psychology Today, in multiple anthologies, and on Chicago’s live lit stages. National media appearances include The Today Show, Good Morning America Radio, and The Wendy Williams Experience.

Deborah received her doctorate in Literary Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has been Adjunct Faculty at DePaul University and a Visiting Scholar at Northwestern University for many years. A dynamic speaker with a personal approach, Deborah has delivered keynotes and taught workshops nationwide. Locally, she has been a guest instructor at StoryStudio Chicago, Piven Theatre Workshop, the Northwestern Summer Writers' Conference, and at Ragdale, where she has been the recipient of multiple writing residencies and now serves on the curatorial board in Creative Nonfiction. She lives in Chicagoland with her husband and their twins and is at work on a book of essays.

Visit Deborah’s author website at www.deborahsiegelphd.com.