Dawn Stanton

Born the year the Pittsburgh Steelers won Superbowl X, I grew up in the College Hill neighborhood of Beaver Falls, a small Western Pennsylvania town known as the home of Joe Namath and the fictional setting for the t.v. show Mr. Belvedere. Both my grandfathers worked in the steel mill, and because football was such a huge deal to everyone, I thought the Superbowl was a holiday like Thanksgiving or Christmas for the first eight years of my life.

Around the time I learned that the Superbowl isn't a national holiday, I also happened to learn the meaning of the suffix -ology—the study of. After that,
I wanted to be an -ologist. Of any sort. I collected bird feathers and obsessed about getting a rock tumbler for Christmas, which my dad operated for me because I was too young to use the polishing kit chemicals. Unfortunately, I had trouble grasping math, and after my parents spent a school year or two traumatizing me with math flash cards—damn it, if I didn't know 6 x 8 when you flashed it at me 40 seconds ago, what makes you think I know it now?—I gave up on the -ology schemes.

Instead, I discovered the joys of writing. It provided a great escape, and I was good at it. I've taken more than a decade of delving into various jobs and genres—travel writing, business writing, newsletters for nonprofits, poetry, fiction, copyediting academic journals—to come full circle back to my interest in science. Now I work to balance my life between the pursuit of science and the passion of writing.