Biography
Rachel Pastan’s novel In the Field, based on the life of Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock, won the inaugural Science + Literature award from the National Book Foundation in 2022. She has also published three other novels: Alena, Lady of the Snakes, and This Side of Married. Alena was named an Editors’ Choice in the New York Times Book Review, and This Side of Married was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection.
In 2014, Pastan edited Seven Writers, a chapbook of writing inspired by exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, where she served as Editor-at-Large for several years and developed the popular blog Miranda. Pastan was a long-time core faculty member at the Bennington Writing Seminars and has taught fiction writing at Swarthmore College, Temple University, and elsewhere. She currently teaches in Drexel University’s MFA program and lives with her husband, an astronomer, in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.