Biography
Sandra Steingraber was adopted as an infant. Steingraber grew up and spent most of her childhood in Tazewell County, Illinois. Her mother was a microbiologist and her father was a community college professor. Her parents inculcated in her an interest in sustainable development and organic agriculture from a young age.
In her 20s, Steingraber developed bladder cancer. She was not alone; in several of her books, she describes an apparent cancer cluster in her hometown and within her family.
After her cancer went into remission, Steingraber completed her undergraduate degree in biology from Illinois Wesleyan University.She worked for several years as a field researcher, eventually earning her doctorate in biology from the University of Michigan. Steingraber also holds a master's degree in English from Illinois State University.
Steingraber was formerly on faculty at Cornell University, she is currently Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Division of Interdisciplinary and International Studies at Ithaca College, located in Ithaca, New York. Steingraber has held visiting fellowships at the University of Illinois, Radcliffe/Harvard, and Northeastern University, and served on President Clinton’s National Action Plan on Breast Cancer.
Steingraber currently lives in Trumansburg, New York with her husband Jeff de Castro, a sculptor and art restoration specialist, along with their two children, Faith and Elijah.
Read more about this topic: Sandra Steingraber
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“There never was a good biography of a good novelist. There couldn’t be. He is too many people, if he’s any good.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.”
—James Boswell (1740–95)