User:EarthMoonBird

Hi, and welcome to my user page. My name (real name!) is Terra Ziporyn Snider, or, sometimes, Terra Ziporyn or even Terra Diane Ziporyn. Having two (or more) names is the curse of being a married woman in modern day America, battling the desire to share a last name with her children (Snider) but not wanting to lose connection with her past. In my case, too, I'm a writer, and with many publications under the name "Terra Ziporyn" out in the world before I got married, I didn't want to disconnect my future writings from those.

EarthMoonBird, on the other hand, is a reference to the somewhat specious translations of my childhood name. It sounds good, anyway.

The Official Stuff

According to my website bio (updated and amplified here, just for you!), I'm an award-winning author of numerous popular health and medical books including THE NEW HARVARD GUIDE TO WOMEN’S HEALTH, THE WOMEN’S CONCISE GUIDE TO EMOTIONAL WELL-BEING, ALTERNATIVE MEDICINE FOR DUMMIES, and NAMELESS DISEASES. After graduating from Yale, where I doubled majored in history and biology (honors in both majors, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa), I was a Searle Fellow at the University of Chicago, where I earned a doctorate in the history of science and medicine while conducting research in biopsychology. My dissertation (later published as Disease in the Popular American Press) was on the popularization of medicine - how scientific findings are translated and communicated to people outside of the research realm - and I've continued to work as a medical popularizer myself ever since then, aiming to make scientific knowledge comprehensible and to put it into a cultural and historical context. A former associate editor at The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), I've written extensively on a wide range of health and medical issues in both professional and popular publications, including The Harvard Health Letter, JAMA, Consumer Reports, Weight Watchers Magazine, Business Week, and Longevity and have been awarded science-writing fellowships by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Chemical Society, and the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. I'm also active playwright and novelist (TIME’S FOOL, THE BLISS OF SOLITUDE, DO NOT GO GENTLE), have worked on several new musicals through the Theatre Building Chicago's Writers Workshop, including a new musical for elementary school performers (TO BE AN EAGLE!).Slightly More Personal Stuff

I live in Maryland with my political scientist husband, J.H. Snider,with whom I co-authored the book FUTURE SHOP, published by St. Martin's Press in 1988 and considered a landmark book in the history of [|e-commerce]. We have three children, grown, or nearly grown: Pallas, Sage, and Solon. We like meaningful names in this family, clearly.

Why I'm Here

I have a bad character trait, common in PhD types, and that's an inexplicable fondness for logic and evidence. I'm also a bit of a grammar/punctuation snob (I do work as an editorial consultant, which is a much more lucrative pursuit than novel writing), and can't bear to see a period on the wrong side of a quotation mark and the like. So the ability to fix glaring errors of fact or presentation is appealing to me (although, ironically, I grew up in an era when we did not diagram sentences, and my knowledge of proper usage comes more by feel than rule books). With my children in college or beyond, I have more time on my hands to reform the world, and, as a freelance writer, I have no one keeping me from doing so. In addition, my husband, a big proponent of the democratization of knowledge (and just about everything), egged me on. He wanted me to add that he attended pretty much the entire Wikimania 2012 and almost joined the big photo shoot but wanted to get back to his family so made a last minute decision to skip it.