Lightning Flowers- A Virtual Evening with Author Katherine Standefer
A Virtual Evening with Kirkus Prize Finalist author Katherine Standefer
Thursday November 18th at 6:00 p.m.
Register to attend this online Zoom link at tinyurl.com/KStandefer
Join us for an excerpt reading and discussion of Standefer’s powerful memoir, Lightning Flowers.
Bio:
Katherine Standefer is the author of Lightning Flowers: My Journey To Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life, which is a Finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction. Lightning Flowers was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice/Staff Pick, named one of Oprah Magazine’s Best Books of Fall 2020, and shortlisted for the 2018 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Previously, Standefer’s essay “In Praise of Contempt” won the 2015 Iowa Review Award in Nonfiction and was selected for The Best American Essays 2016, and her other work has appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. She was a 2017 Marion Weber Healing Arts Fellow at The Mesa Refuge and a 2018 Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good. Standefer earned her MFA at the University of Arizona and teaches for Ashland University’s Low-Residency MFA. She lives on a piñon- and juniper-studded mesa in New Mexico with her chickens.
Lightning Flowers Description:
What if a lifesaving medical device causes loss of life along its supply chain? That’s the question Katherine E. Standefer finds herself asking one night after being suddenly shocked by her implanted cardiac defibrillator. In this gripping, intimate memoir, Standefer tells the story of her troubled relationship to her own ICD, from her harrowing experience in the American healthcare system to her global journey to the mines and factories where the minerals in her device may have originated. Deeply personal and sharply reported, Lightning Flowers takes a hard look at technological mythos, healthcare, and our cultural relationship to death, raising important questions about our obligations to one another, and the cost of saving one life.
Recent Publicity:
https://www.npr.org/2020/11/10/933459943/embracing-life-with-a-heart-condition
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-07-12/heart-screening-teens-pediatric-guidelines