Bestselling author Rebecca Skloot to teach narrative writing at Berkeley J-School

The UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism is pleased to announce that Rebecca Skloot, science journalist and author of the critically acclaimed nonfiction bestseller, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, will join its instructional team as a long-form writing teacher for the spring 2016 semester.

Skloot has written for The New York Times Magazine, Popular Science, Columbia Journalism Review and Discover, among many other publications. She worked as a correspondent for WNYC’s Radiolab and PBS’s Nova ScienceNOW, and edited The Best American Science Writing 2011 and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2015. Skloot has been featured on numerous television and radio shows, including CBS Sunday Morning, The Colbert Report, and Fresh Air. She has taught creative writing and science journalism at the University of Memphis, the University of Pittsburgh, and New York University.

“I’m a big believer in the importance of storytelling in journalism — particularly in science writing,” Skloot said. “My classes tend to focus on blending narrative techniques with solid reporting skills to keep readers engaged while educating them about important and often complex topics.”

Skloot’s debut book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, has spent more than four years on the New York Times best-seller list and was chosen as a best book of the year by more than 60 media outlets, including Entertainment Weekly, National Public Radio, and New York Times. It won awards from the National Academies of Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, GoodReads, and numerous others, and was named The Best Book of 2010 and one of the 100 Books to Read In a Lifetime by Amazon.com. It has been translated into more than 25 languages and is required reading in schools worldwide. It is currently being made into an HBO movie produced by Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball.

“Rebecca’s book is a powerful portrait of a wrong that was so novel there wasn’t even a name for it,” said the J-School’s dean, media ethicist Edward Wasserman. “Cells harvested, without her knowledge, from a poor, terminally ill woman in the early 1950s became the foundation for path-breaking research that yielded vast fortunes for pharmaceutical companies and researchers. It’s a riveting story, told with great skill, and built on a decade of tireless reporting, and we’re very pleased that Rebecca will be joining our top-tier narrative writing teachers.”

Among the J-School’s long-form instructors are Michael Pollan, Mark Danner, Jennifer Kahn, Adam Hochschild, Deirdre English, and Edwin Dobb.

Skloot is currently working on a book about humans, animals, science, and ethics.