Born in New York City back when it was legitimately dangerous, Christina Ann-Marie DiEdoardo has been fascinated with history, particularly the tales of those society sees as outlaws, since she could first open a book. A dual citizen of Canada and the United States, she can claim a dubious ancestral connection to historical Irish pirates on the Canadian side of her family and a firmer one to Italian relatives who actively discourage such nosy questions on the other.

Christina spent ten years as an award-winning print reporter for a variety of newspapers in Missouri and California, talking to people from criminal defense lawyers in San Diego to pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong and trying to do honor to their stories. She also was lucky enough to get her first serious death threat connected with her work at a time when she was too young and inexperienced to take it as seriously as she should have.

Christina was part of the team of activists and lawyers who secured the repeal in 1998 of San Diego Municipal Code 56.19, the last enforced criminal ordinance in a major American city which targeted Trans people for simply appearing in public as their authentic selves. Shortly thereafter, she left journalism for the law.

After graduating cum laude with a juris doctorate from the William S. Boyd School of Law in 2005, Christina has worked as a criminal defense attorney in Nevada and California, where she has helped hundreds of people during the most challenging periods of their lives. That work gave her a deep appreciation of the gaps between what the American system of justice promises and what it delivers.

When not attempting to straighten out her clients’ misunderstandings with law enforcement in California and Nevada, Christina serves her community as an advocate for criminal justice and social reform and as a historian. She stood with anti-Fascist activists at all five Battles of Berkeley from January 2017 through August 2018, where she was hit with CS spray from Fascists on two occasions and where she took a weapon away from a Nazi skinhead once. She also provides pro bono and reduced-fee legal services to a variety of charitable organizations and needy individuals in the Bay Area and elsewhere.

Christina wrote the “Resist” column, which covered local anti-Fascist activism, for the Bay Area Reporter, the oldest continually published LGBTQ newspaper in the United States, from July 2017 through March 2019. Her previous published works include Lanza’s Mob: The Mafia and San Francisco (ABC-CLIO, 2016) which was the first history of the Italian Mafia to focus on the activities of its San Francisco crime family, and Torture and Enhanced Interrogation: A Reference Handbook (ABC-CLIO, 2020).

She resides in San Francisco, California, where she has merrily defied a curse reportedly placed on her apartment building by Anton LaVey, the late founder of the Church of Satan, as well as the far more formidable adversary of gentrification, for over a decade.