The 2020 Winner Selection Panel
Laura Carroll, Panel Chair, is a nonfiction writer, and her books include Families of Two: Interviews With Happily Married Couples Without Children by Choice (with its 2nd edition in development) and The Baby Matrix. Families of Two received global recognition and paved the way for her to be internationally known as an expert on the childfree choice since the year 2000. She has a MS in Psychology, and has conducted qualitative research on the childfree choice since the late 1990s. Laura ran the popular blog, La Vie Childfree, now a childfree writings library at lauracarroll.com. She is currently finishing a 10-year study on childfree women. Her books have been used in college curriculum, and she is also a contributor to the textbook, Voluntary and Involuntary Childlessness: The Joys of Otherhood?. Laura has appeared on network television, including ABC’s Good Morning America and CBS’ The Early Show, and has been a guest on many radio talk shows, US and Canadian public radio. She and her work have been in a wide range of print/digital media, including Fortune, The Wall Street Journal and New York Magazine.
Maxine Trump is an award-winning director of To Kid Or Not To Kid, a film that aims to dispel the myth that living childfree is weird, selfish or somehow wrong. She and the film have been featured on major media, including the TODAY show, the New York Times, LA Times, Forbes, National Post, and the Boston Globe. In addition to its recent worldwide release, her previous feature film, Musicwood, was a New York Times Critics pick, festival award winner and played on TV and in theaters around the world. Maxine has worked for the BBC, as a TV commercial director, and has directed documentaries for Sundance, TNT, TLC, and Discovery. She is the author of The Documentary Filmmakers Roadmap (Routledge), is a Sundance advisor and teaches documentary filmmaking at the New York Film Academy. She lives in Brooklyn, NY with her husband and inquisitive cat, and is always seeking new stories to tell.
Jessica Wade works in IT for the University of Maine. She is the creator of the Facebook page The Childfree Choice, which has over 33,000 followers, and its corresponding website and social media pages. She does guest speaking at events throughout the year and talks about being childfree and what that means in the world today. In her free time, she enjoys hanging out with her husband of twelve years and their plethora of pets, traveling, reading, and gardening.
Lucas Chaney is a co-founder of #NoKids LLC, a childfree business that offers a new apparel brand labeled #NoKids to the childfree among us the t-shirts and other merchandise to proudly declare our #NoKids lifestyle! He has a Masters in IT from the University of North Texas and is a Cloud sales rep for a large IT organization. When Lucas went looking for childfree merchandise and didn’t find much available he decided to use his IT skills to create an e-commerce business to provide empowering childfree merchandise to like-minded people.
Chelsey Wren is a Canadian-based communications professional and founded Childfree is Not a Dirty Word, a website and social media community which had over 40,000 people. Chelsey founded Childfree is Not a Dirty Word after facing repeated backlash for her decision not to have children. Knowing she couldn’t be alone out there, she has created an ever-growing community of like-minded individuals who share the stories of their diverse lives. Chelsey hopes to help to bring the term ‘childfree’ into the mainstream and, in doing so, let young women know motherhood is a choice.