Erin Bank

Erin M. Bank lives, works, runs, and writes in San Francisco, CA. By day, she has an administrative job at an academic university. By night and early morning, she writes about finding her own voice and about characters finding theirs. Erin was born in Tucson, AZ. Her family moved to Northfield, MN when she was seven, so she considers the Midwest her true roots. She still has the collection of spiral-bound notebooks holding the stories she’d write late at night, her first foray into creative writing. As a student at the University of Rochester in New York, she started down the lab rat career path, earning a BS in Biochemistry. She was one of those weird scientists who also enjoyed pulling all-nighters to write essays for her literature and history electives. She went directly on to graduate school at the Weill Cornell Medical College on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, earning a PhD in Pharmacology for her work studying the parasite that causes malaria. She enjoyed defending the placement of “that” versus “which” as much as the scientific conclusions of her experiments. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Erin wrote and edited nearly every word of English that was produced by her lab, from emails to publications to grants, and once again discovered her love of the written word. Upon her return to the US, she spent time freelancing and consulting as a science editor and writer, which lead to a role at UCSF writing and editing grant proposals. She now manages one of these large grants, and her favorite days on the job are those she gets to write and collaborate with smart people. Erin blogs at latentlollygagger.wordpress.com and posts essays to Medium as @bankoferin (also her Twitter handle). She hopes to complete her current novel soon (draft 1 of X is done). When she’s not sitting at a desk, she’s running the trails of Marin County and Golden Gate Park wearing the blue of the Impala Racing Team, watching for whales from the San Francisco apartment she shares with her boyfriend, trying to remember how to play piano, trying to learn how to surf and kite surf, and reading fast but not quickly enough to get through her to-read list.