Katherine Standefer is the author of Lightning Flowers: My Journey To Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life (Little, Brown Spark), which was a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice/Staff Pick and the November 2020 Group Text Pick. Named one of O, The Oprah Magazine's Best Books of Fall 2020, Lightning Flowers was also shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, named one of Kirkus's Best 100 Nonfiction Books of 2020, and featured in People Magazine, on NPR's Fresh Air, and the goop podcast. Her previous writing appeared in The Best American Essays 2016 and won the 2015 Iowa Review Award in Nonfiction. She was a 2017 Marion Weber Healing Arts Fellow at the Mesa Refuge, a 2018 Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good, and a 2018 writer-in-residence at Jentel Arts. Standefer earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Arizona and teaches for Ashland University's Low-Residency MFA. As a trauma writing doula, she helps writers birth difficult and important stories of the body. She lives on a piñon- and juniper-studded mesa in New Mexico with her chickens.
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