Sunu Chandy

Sunu Chandy has a way with words, whether testifying in Congress to strengthen LGBTQ legal protections, providing testimony with the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights on sexual harassment and #MeToo, or writing her own poetry. That’s right, the legal director of the National Women’s Law Center also has an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from CUNY/Queens College. “I’m proud to be a queer woman of color poet and a civil rights attorney,” Chandy tells GO. “I want to send love to all the culture change artists who create joy and community building, including through Split This Rock, a social justice poetry organization that’s so close to my heart.” Chandy sits on that organization’s board of directors, as well as the board of the Transgender Law Center. Her work has taken her from labor law, representing individual workers and unions, to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, to being a member of the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Regional Working Group. In her current role at NWLC, she oversees the Center’s litigation efforts while providing strategy to create better outcomes for women and girls in all spaces, and she helped build the policies and procedures guiding the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund. She says she’s grateful to her “terrific colleagues” at the National Women’s Law Center. “We use the law in all its forms to advance the rights of women and girls,” she says, “and to prevent and address sex discrimination, including as faced by LGBTQ folks, immigrants, people with disabilities and people of color.” —JDG