Virtual Author Talk: Katherine E. Standefer

Join us for a Facebook livestream with Katherine E. Standefer, author of “Lightning Flowers.”

Join us for a Facebook Live stream with Katherine E. Standefer, author of "Lightning Flowers." To watch, visit our Facebook page at the scheduled time for the live stream: https://www.facebook.com/FayettevillePublicLibrary/

Katherine E. Standefer is the author of "Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life," which "O Magazine" named one of the Best Books of Fall 2020 and The New York Times Book Review chose as its November 2020 Group Text Pick and an Editor's Choice/Staff Pick in the 11/29 issue of NYTBR. In 2018, the book was shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. It received a starred Kirkus review and was recently featured in "People Magazine" and on NPR's Fresh Air. Standefer's other writing has won the Iowa Review Award in Nonfiction and appeared in "The Best American Essays 2016." She has been a Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good, a Marion Weber Healing Arts Fellow at the Mesa Refuge, and a resident at Jentel Arts. Standefer earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from the University of Arizona and teaches for Ashland University's Low-Residency MFA program. She lives on a piñon- and juniper-studded mesa in New Mexico with her chickens.

Summary of 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 about health, illness, and the invisible reverberating effects of our medical system, Standefer recounts the astonishing true story of the rare diagnosis that upended her rugged life in the mountains of Wyoming and sent her tumbling into a fraught maze of cardiology units, dramatic surgeries, and slow, painful recoveries. As her life increasingly comes to revolve around the internal defibrillator freshly wired into her heart, she becomes consumed with questions about the supply chain that allows such an ostensibly miraculous device to exist. So she sets out to trace its materials back to their roots.

From the sterile labs of a medical device manufacturer in southern California to the tantalum and tin mines seized by armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to a nickel and cobalt mine carved out of endemic Madagascar jungle, "Lightning Flowers" takes us on a global reckoning with the social and environmental costs of a technology that promises to be lifesaving but is, in fact, much more complicated.
Deeply personal and sharply reported, "Lightning Flowers" takes a hard look at technological mythos, healthcare, and our cultural relationship to medical technology, raising important questions about our obligations to one another, and the cost of saving one life.

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