Heather Corinna

In 2015, Corinna received the Sexual Health Champion award from Vancouver-based Options for Sexual Health.

Since the main content of the site was off-limits to teenagers, they posted five pages of basic sexual education content for teenagers to read. Upon being deluged with requests for further information, they established Scarleteen in 1998. The side of the website targeted to girls was originally known as "Pink Slip". In 1999, they added a section targeted to boys, initially known as "The Boyfriend".

During their twenties, Corinna worked for several years as an early childhood educator. After working in education with developmentally disabled adults and in a Montessori elementary classroom, they founded an alternative kindergarten/pre-kindergarten in Chicago, which they ran from 1992 to 1996. They continued to work as a kindergarten teacher until quitting to work on Scarleteen full-time.

In the late 1990s, Corinna founded Scarlet Letters, an adult erotica online magazine targeted to women. Shortly after creating the site, their site was removed by web hosting provider Verio, forcing them to find alternate hosting.

Both Scarlet Letters and Scarleteen faced difficulty obtaining both traffic and financial support in their early years. In the 1990s, Scarleteen was often excluded by mainstream directories as too sexual, while pornographic sites also refused to provide it as a link for under-18 visitors. The site subsequently came to survive largely on donations, some of which now come from past users with children of their own.

Corinna is a 1986 graduate of the Chicago Academy of the Arts, where they studied music, creative writing, and art. They also attended Shimer College, then located in Waukegan, majoring in Humanities.

Heather Corinna (born April 18, 1970) is an author, activist, and Internet publisher with a focus on progressive, affirming sexuality. They are a self-described "queer, rabblerousing, polymath." They were one of the pioneers of positive human sexuality on the Internet. They have advocated for accepting the diverse forms of a sexual experience and avoiding "expertitis".