Beryl lieff benderly biography of michael jackson

Prize-winning freelance health and science journalist Beryl Lieff Benderly is the author or co-author of eight books, including Challening the Breast Cancer Legacy and Dancing Without Music: Deafness in America, as well as hundreds of articles that have appeared Scientific American, Scientific American Mind, Discover, Prism,Slate,Ladies Home Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times and Los Angeles Times book reviews, among many other prominent publications.

"Doubleday has made an offer," she said. 2000.

IN HER OWN RIGHT: THE IOM GUIDE TO WOMEN’S HEALTH ISSUES.

After several years, I began applying those lessons to what I really, ultimately wanted to do. For two weeks I spent all the time I could at Gallaudet, learning all that I could. There I was, a published journalist and author!

It was my agent who decided I had the makings of a health writer. People were amazed that such a scholarship existed, but I qualified.

"I think you should take it."

Astounded, I did. "Yes," she answered, "you keep saying that. Then I wrote a ten-page book proposal and mailed it to a hungry young agent I had met in New York.

Two weeks later I called her to see what was going on. To find out if there was anything in this academic business, I spent the next few years teaching college (back in the distant days of the teacher shortage, it was possible to do so without actually getting the Ph.D.).

"It could take months. Light dawned. I'll call you when anything happens."

Two weeks later she did. My classroom experiences convinced me that I was wrong about that, too, so I chucked the whole idea.

That fall I followed my husband to Washington, D.C. I needed a job, and the only credentials I had were in anthropology.

Then I remembered hearing about a college for the deaf over in the Northeast part of town.

'But are they paying you enough?'

"College for the deaf" sounded like an oxymoron to me, and I was intrigued. Once again, my chance came, as it were, totally by chance. "This may take a while," she said. All I had to do was write furiously, go downtown and stand in a long line for a morning every other week, fill out some papers, send out some resumes and talk to people about finding a job, and cash the biweekly checks that came in the mail.

The long line was at the Unemployment Office, and that's also the name that was at the top of the check.

I started submitting and selling freelance articles, learning about the magazine business from books I got at the library.

Then the job went away in a government budget cut. It made a tremendous splash in the small world of deafness, and I was a semi-famous figure in that little universe and, amazingly enough, a deafness expert, sort of.