BONNIE J. ROUGH is the author of Beyond Birds & Bees: Bringing Home a New Message to Our Kids About Sex, Love, and Equality, forthcoming from Seal Press/Hachette at back-to-school 2018. Her previous books include The Girls, Alone: Six Days in Estonia, selected by Amazon as one of the Best Kindle Singles of 2015, and the memoir Carrier: Untangling the Danger in My DNA (Counterpoint), winner of a 2011 Minnesota Book Award. A former journalist with an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from the University of Iowa, her work has appeared in numerous anthologies including The Best American Science and Nature Writing, The Best Creative Nonfiction, and Modern Love. Her essays have appeared in dozens of publications including The New York Times; Huffington Post; The Sun; Brain, Child; The Iowa Review; Florida Review; and Brevity. She also writes essay-reviews for the Seattle Review of Books. Rough's essays and talks on subjects ranging from science and sexuality to parenting and the writer’s life have reached audiences across the U.S. and abroad. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, she has lived in the Midwest and in the Netherlands and now resides in Seattle with her family. She teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Ashland University.