Bio
George Estreich is Nonfiction Editor at AGNI and a faculty member at Oregon State University, where he teaches in the MFA program in Creative Nonfiction. He received his B.A. from the University of Virginia, where he studied with Charles Wright, and his M.F.A. in poetry from Cornell University, where he studied with Robert Morgan and A.R. Ammons. After completing his M.F.A., he published a chapbook of poems (Elegy for Dan Rabinowitz, Intertext, 1993) and a full-length collection, Textbook Illustrations of the Human Body (2003), which won the Rhea and Seymour Gorsline Prize from Cloudbank Books.
His first book of prose, the Oregon Book Award-winning The Shape of the Eye: A Memoir (2011), wove together the story of raising a daughter with Down syndrome, the author’s relationship with his Japanese mother, and the complicated history of a condition originally known as “Mongolian idiocy.” Abraham Verghese called The Shape of the Eye “a poignant, beautifully written and intensely moving memoir,” adding, “It will become part of the canon of narratives that are studied and taught in medical humanities courses.” Originally published in hardcover by SMU Press, Shape was reissued in paperback by Tarcher/Penguin in 2013.
Estreich’s next book, Fables and Futures: Biotechnology, Disability, and the Stories we Tell Ourselves (MIT Press, 2019), moved beyond Down syndrome to reflect on new reproductive technologies from a disability-centered perspective. Fables was praised in both academic and popular journals, including Science, Disability Studies Quarterly, and Inside Higher Ed, where Scott McLemee wrote, "The book is a sort of intellectual travelogue, the author thinking his way across a landscape that is changing faster than it can be captured in concepts . . . Estreich is uncommonly adept at presenting both experiences and ideas in layers, without the structure itself becoming either unmanageable or distracting. Anyone who reads it should expect the wheels in their head to keep spinning for a while afterward." NPR’s Science Friday named Fables and Futures as a Best Science Book of 2019; a Japanese translation was published in 2021.
Estreich’s next book project was a collaborative work: along with Rachel Adams, he completed and co-edited the late Alison Piepmeier’s Unexpected: Parenting, Prenatal Testing, and Down Syndrome (NYU Press, 2021), left incomplete at Piepmeier’s untimely death from cancer. Rayna Rapp, author of Testing Women, Testing the Fetus, praised Unexpected as “a beautiful, thoughtful, and challenging co-authored and deeply reflexive book.” Michael Bérubé, author of Life as We Know It, wrote, “Unexpected is literally a labor of love, and the world is a brighter place for it.”
Since the publication of Unexpected, Estreich has been a part of the Motherhood and Technology Working Group, a scholarly discussion group based at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference. His recently completed essay on gender reveal parties and disability, emerging from discussions with that group, is slated to be published in a special issue of the Journal of Medical Humanities; a version of that essay will be part of The Shadow Family, as will his essay “Concision: A Sprawl,” originally published in AGNI and chosen by Vivian Gornick for The Best American Essays 2023. The Shadow Family is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press.
