Katherine E. Standefer

media release: A Room of One's Own welcomes Katherine Standefer for a conversation on her book Lightning Flowers!

About Lightning Flowers

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 the medical technology in her chest, 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.

Katherine Standefer is the author of Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life, which was a Finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction and the Arizona/New Mexico Book Award in Memoir, selected as a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice/Staff Pick, and shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Lightning Flowers was featured on NPR’s Fresh Air, on the goop podcast, in The Oprah Magazine, and in People Magazine. Standefer’s previous writing appeared in The Best American Essays 2016. She earned her MFA at the University of Arizona and was a 2018 Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good. Originally from the Chicago suburbs, Standefer now lives on a piñon- and juniper-studded mesa in New Mexico with her chickens.