Shakespeare & Co. is pleased to host a reading by author and University of Montana Environmental Writing Institute alum Katherine E. Standefer on Monday, October 28, at 7:00 pm. Standefer will read from her debut book Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life (Little Brown Spark, 2022). This event is free and open to the public.

Author Bio
Katherine E. Standefer's debut book Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life was a Finalist for the 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 University. Lightning Flowers was also chosen as the Common Read at Colorado College in '22-'23, featured on NPR's Fresh Air, and named one of O, The Oprah Magazine's Best Books of Fall 2020. Standefer earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction at the University of Arizona. She has been a Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good and a Marion Weber Healing Arts Fellow at the Mesa Refuge. Her work was included in The Best American Essays 2016. Standefer regularly gives talks on narrative medicine and the supply chain ethics of medical technology. She lives in Wyoming.

About the Book
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.

Katherine E. Standefer