Bio

George Estreich’s publications include a chapbook, Elegy for Dan Rabinowitz (Intertext, 1993) and a full-length poetry collection, Textbook Illustrations of the Human Body, which won the Gorsline Prize from Cloudbank Books (2003). The Shape of the Eye (SMU Press, 2011; Penguin, 2013), his memoir about raising a daughter with Down syndrome, received the 2012 Oregon Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. Estreich has published essays and articles in The New York Times, The Oregonian, Avidly, The American Medical Association Journal of Ethics, Salon, Tin House, and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. 

His new book, Fables and Futures: Biotechnology, Disability, and the Stories we Tell Ourselves (MIT Press), was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and was named a Best Science Book of 2019 by NPR's Science Friday. Fables and Futures explores the way we think and talk about human-directed biotechnology, from next-generation prenatal tests to CRISPR/Cas9, the genome-editing tool. Blending personal narrative and scholarship, Estreich argues that with biotech able to select and shape who we are, we need to imagine what it means to belong.