Katherine Standefer

Katherine Standefer (2018) writes about the body, consent and medical technology from Tucson, Arizona. Her debut book, “Lightning Flowers,” is forthcoming from Little, Brown and Company in early 2020 and was shortlisted for the 2018 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. 

Katherine’s previous essays have appeared in Best American Essays 2016, won the 2015 Iowa Review Award in Nonfiction and been selected as Notable in Best American Essays 2017. Her other work has been published in or is forthcoming from The Normal School, The New England Review, Fourth Genre, The Iowa Review, Crazyhorse, The Colorado Review, High Country News, Edible Baja Arizona, Alpinist Magazine, Lithub and The Rumpus. She earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing from the University of Arizona. She is a professor in Ashland University’s Low-Residency MFA program.

As a Logan Nonfiction fellow, Katherine will work on “Lightning Flowers,” a reported memoir that brings medical technology into conversation with resource extraction. The book tells the story of her troubled relationship to her own implanted cardiac defibrillator in the context of the American healthcare system, while exploring her years-long attempt to trace the global supply chain of the device, asking whether a lifesaving device could have caused loss of life elsewhere.