Biography of

Here's the biographical blurb from Still Forms on Foxfield:

Joan Slonczewski was born in New York, studied biology and chemistry at Bryn Mawr and Haverford colleges, and earned her Ph.D in molecular biophysics from Yale. She is now a professor of biology at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, where she lives with her husband and their two children.

Still Forms on Foxfield, Ms. Slonczewski's first novel, was written after she graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1977. Her second novel, A Door Into Ocean, available from Avon Books, won the 1987 John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the first book by a woman ever to receive that honor.

Here's what Joan Slonczewski says about herself:

I was born in Hyde Park but grew up in Katonah, NY. Katonah was a very sheltered, forested place when I was growing up. I used to look up at the trees in the blue sky and imagine the branches growing downward instead of up; I think that's where the image of the raft roots in the water came from, in A Door Into Ocean.

My father was (is) a physicist at IBM, and I used to play with the IBM 360. We spent a couple years in Zurich with the guys that won the Nobels for STM and superconductivity. I went to the local school there in 3rd grade and was exposed to a very different political system; I've been interested in that sort of thing ever since. But I was always most interested in biology, and became a molecular biologist. At Yale I studied how bacteria swim; they have tails that rotate, powered by electrostatic motors in their membrane. So I always wanted to do a book on creatures with wheels.

My favorite authors are Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. My favorite SF authors are Robert A. Heinlein and Ursula K. LeGuin. My favorite books in recent years include Connie Willis' Doomsday Book, Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, and Fannie Flagg's Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe.

My current research is about how bacteria survive environmental stress. I study intestinal bacteria, and how they get through the acid stomach to live in the intestine. I look at which genes are "turned on" to help the bacteria survive. My Kenyon students do much of my research, using up-to-date techniques like Polymerase Chair Reaction (what they used in Jurassic Park to clone the dinosaurs.)

When I'm not teaching, researching, writing, or administering a $1.5 million Hughes grant for Kenyon science, I'm doing computer stuff with my two children (age 13 and 9). My husband, Michael Barich, teaches classics at Kenyon, and buys/sells high-tech stocks on the side. We all attend Granville Friends Meeting (Quakers).

No matter how busy you are, if you live in the U.S. go out and VOTE in November. It's fine to dream up great new worlds but we all live in this one.

Last modified: August 2, 1996

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