Katherine Standefer
Our second author in our Do No Harm panel is Katherine Standefer, author of the brilliant 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 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.
Katherine Standefer is the author of Lightning Flowers, which was a Finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction, 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 and the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Her previous work appeared in The Best American Essays 2016. She was a Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good in 2018 and a Marion Weber Healing Arts Fellow at The Mesa Refuge in 2017. Standefer teaches at Ashland University's Low-Residency MFA Program. She lives on a mesa in New Mexico with her chickens.
