Pamela Rice

When Pamela Rice tagged along with a friend to a vegetarian conference in 1990, little did she know she would be so affected by the information in which she was about to be exposed. Indeed, when she got back home she instinctively started a list of reasons to be a vegetarian.

At the time, Ms. Rice worked as a sales representative for a full-service print shop. The next step was natural--write up a list of the best reasons and send it through her employer's facility. Once she had her stacks of "veggie flyers," out she went to the streets -- New York City streets, that is, where she lives. She was frequently seen at this time passing out copies of "101 Reasons Why I'm a Vegetarian" to passersby, spreading the eye-opening information about the many dark sides of the meat business. It happens that the feedback for her avocation turned out to be very good, and today there are over 200,000 pamphlets in circulation, seven updated editions, and twelve printings. Current editions are still selling, mostly by word of mouth.

In the 1990s, Ms. Rice founded a magazine -- The VivaVine -- and produced 50 editions of it. At the time, it was state-of-the-art in vegetarian journalism.

Eventually, Lantern Books asked Ms. Rice to be one of its authors, and a little while later the pamphlet was enlarged to about eight times its size and available in book form. Both Publishers Weekly and Library Journal gave the book excellent reviews.

Today, Pamela Rice may be better known as the organizer of the Veggie Pride Parade in New York City, but at heart, she's still a writer.