Jan Steckel - Personal Life

Personal Life

Steckel grew up in Santa Monica, where she attended Lincoln Junior High School (now Lincoln Middle School), studying journalism under Carol Jago. She went to Santa Monica High School, where she once confided that she enjoyed a "love/hate" relationship with the world of mathematics—a sentiment that might have been prescient of her later toggling between science/medicine and the world of letters.

In high school Steckel was known for her vocal range, and sang briefly with a band, Industrial Waist—which brought her on for live performances of Grace Slick's part in Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love". Her associates during her high school and college years included the Westsiders in Los Angeles who called themselves the "Olive Starlight Orchestra" (but had nothing to do with music; it was just a social circle, like the Bloomsbury Group).

Steckel associated at that time with such luminaries as computer graphics researcher Greg Turk; neurobiologist David Linden; Academy Award-winner and scanning/computer graphics expert David Coons; entrepreneur/pornographer Christophe Pettus, founder of the sex-toy company Blowfish, columnist, one-woman show creator, writer, and radio personality Sandra Tsing Loh; mathematician and co-founder of Rhythm and Hues Studios Keith Goldfarb, internet activist and law professor Susan P. Crawford; producer/computer-graphics innovator Eric Enderton, politician/attorney Sandra Levin, and conservative blogger Joy W. McCann.

Steckel, openly bisexual, lives in Northern California with her husband Hew Wolff, who has collaborated on some of her poetry.