On Tuesday April 19 at 1 PM ET, Shelby Knox and filmmakers Marion Lipshutz and Rose Rosenblatt will participate in a live chat with POV viewers. Send them a question or sign up for a reminder email to join the discussion.
In 2005, POV aired The Education of Shelby Knox, a film which follows a self-described “good Southern Baptist girl” as she becomes an unlikely advocate for comprehensive sex education. When she finds that her hometown of Lubbock, Texas has some of the highest rates of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases in the state, and her county’s high schools teach abstinence as the only safe sex, Shelby Knox becomes a headstrong sex education activist, profoundly changing her political and spiritual views along the way. “I think that God wants you to question,” Shelby says, “to do more than just blindly be a follower, because he can’t use blind followers. He can use people like me who realize there’s more in the world that can be done.” The film is a story for our times, where the combustible mix of politics, family and faith aren’t as predictable as the red state/blue state divide would suggest.
Following the release of the film, Shelby became an itinerant feminist organizer, traveling across the country to speak to and organize with young people for gender justice. She is often called upon to provide a youth voice in the national media — she has appeared on The Today Show, Good Morning America, and The Dr. Phil Show and in Glamour, Bust, and Seventeen magazines. She’s written for Jezebel, Feministe, RH Reality Check and she blogs regularly at The Ms. Education of Shelby Knox. She was recently lauded as “the next Gloria Steinem” by Marie Claire and is one of Forbes 20 Most Inspiring Women to Follow on Twitter. Shelby lives in New York City and is the Director of Organizing, Women’s Rights, for Change.org.
Watch a recent video about Shelby Knox by Marie Claire magazine below.
Watch The Education of Shelby Knox in its entirety through April 30, 2011 on the POV website. It is only available in the United States.