Virgie Tovar is a plus-size Latina author, lecturer, and leading expert on weight-based discrimination and body positivity with over a decade of experience. She is a contributor for Forbes.com where she covers the plus-size market and how to end weight discrimination at work.
In 2011, Tovar completed a Master's degree focused on the study of how weight-based discrimination impacted lifelong gender trajectories in women of color. After building an academic foundation at the intersections of body size, race and gender, Tovar left academia in pursuit of creating solutions for and working closely with individuals impacted by weight bias. In 2012, she edited the anthology Hot & Heavy: Fierce Fat Girls on Life, Love and Fashion (Seal Press). In 2013 she started the hashtag campaign #LoseHateNotWeight, and in 2018 Tovar gave a TedX talk on the origins of the campaign. She's the author of You Have the Right to Remain Fat (Feminist Press, 2018), which was placed on the American Library Association's Amelia Bloomer List, The Self-Love Revolution: Radical Body Positivity for Girls of Color (New Harbinger, 2020) and an interactive book, The Body Positive Journal (Chronicle Books, 2022). Her new Substack vertical, VOLUMINATI, is a monthly audiotextual experimental essay series.
Tovar has been named one of the 50 most influential feminists by Bitch Magazine. She has received three San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Commissions, the Inspire Award from Project HEAL, as well as Yale's Poynter Fellowship in Journalism. Virgie has been featured by the New York Times, Tech Insider, BBC, MTV, NPR, and Yahoo Health. She lives in San Francisco.