Growing up in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania, I wanted to be a polar bear. That didn’t work out, which is probably a good thing given the rapidly disappearing polar ice. Instead, I became a biologist. But after earning a bachelor’s degree from the College of William and Mary and a master’s degree from Dartmouth College, I discovered I was all thumbs in the lab. Laboratory research was definitely not in my future.
In my first “real” job, I discovered that a lot of people don’t like to write, but I’ve always loved putting ideas on paper. Every job I’ve ever had became a writing job. When I worked as the quality control director at a vegetable cannery, I wrote everything from reports for the Food and Drug Administration to responses to customer complaints. When I worked as a teacher at a training school for nannies, who wrote the school newsletter? You guessed it. Then I was asked to write a newspaper column about games and another one about parenting. Finally, I just gave up and became a full-time writer. Over the past thirty years, I have written everything from restaurant reviews to true-life stories to mysteries to textbooks.
To date, I have twelve published books. The most recent one, Vaccines: History, Science, and Issues, (ABC-CLIO/Greenwood) explains the science behind vaccines, how they work, and why they are controversial. Writing this book gave me a chance to share my fascination with human biology in non-technical language that high school students and adult can understand. A second book, The Anti-Vaccination Movement, is scheduled for 2018.
Most of my books are nonfiction books for young people. The book I most enjoyed researching was African American Scientists and Inventors (Mason Crest). Once a child told me that she “thought you had to be dead to be an author.” I suspected that some children thought the same things about inventors, so I decided to interview some living scientists and inventors for this book and wrote about a few.
A second favorite book in terms of interesting research was Global Trade in the Ancient World (Mason Crest). I now know where all the “stan” countries are —Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan—because ancient trade routes ran through these countries.
In my non-writing time, I volunteer for Guide Dogs for the Blind, cook, garden, and read. I recently traveled to Costa Rica and Panama and am planning a trip to Hong Kong to visit family. My favorite country visited so far is Australia, and some day I hope to spend an extended period there.
Want to learn more about me? Read my interview with David Alan Binder at https://sites.google.com/site/dalanbinder/blog/tishdavidsoninterviewwithdavidalanbinder
