Above: Minal Hajratwala, the senior journalist. (With Rajiv Chandrasekaran, techonology reporter for The Washington Post, at Unity99 in Seattle).

Below: Photos of Minal the poet and performer

MINAL HAJRATWALA is editor of Perspective, the Sunday viewpoints and ideas section of the San Jose Mercury News. Since joining the Mercury News as an intern in 1992, she has worked in various editing and reporting positions and led two content audits that resulted in improvements in how the newspaper covers its diverse community. From 1995 to 1997 she served as the newspaper's first reader representative, pioneering new ways to involve readers in decisions from daily story play to long-term newspaper policy and strategy.

Hajratwala serves on the advisory council of NewsWatch, a media diversity project based at San Francisco State University. As a former board member of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, she helped to launch the nation's first sexual-orientation-in-the-workplace training program for newspaper and broadcast companies.

She is a graduate of Stanford University. She is also an award-winning poet and performer whose literary work has appeared in journals and anthologies. In 1999 she wrote and performed in her first full-length show, "AVATARS: Gods for a New Millennium," at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. She is an inaugural writing fellow for 1999-2000 of the Sundance Institute, participating in the creation of a new body of writing about film.

E-mail: MHajratwala@sjmercury.com