Mary Jean (MJ) Pramik, author, novelist, poet, travel writer, science reporter, and teacher has contributed to numerous magazines and journals, anthologies and travel books including Good Housekeeping, Odyssey, and the National Enquirer as well as Ophthalmology Times, Nature Biotechnology, Drug Topics, and Cosmetic Surgery News. She was a regular contributor to Genetic Engineering News for 18 years during the heyday of the burgeoning biotechnology era.

A coalminer’s daughter and a great, great, great granddaughter of the Mongolian plain, MJ is the author of the novel G.E.M. of Egypt: A Novel of Ohio, and is currently at work on her second book of fiction. She contributed to the “Venturing in” travel series on the Canal du Midi, Southern Greece, Southern Ireland, and Puglia, Italy, and Wandering in Costa Rica and Wandering in Bali. Serendipity, her memoir of a solo trip around Sri Lanka after the recent civil war, should see the light of publication soon. MJ has won Solas Travel Writing awards for essays about the discoveries of self (Running in Puglia), family (The Drummer’s Heart), and fellow inhabitants who journey across this planet. Her poetry has appeared in Marin Poetry Center Anthology 2013 Trees and Marin Poetry Center Anthology 2014 Rocks, Stones, and other literary venues.

She holds both undergraduate and graduate degrees in biological sciences and completed her MFA in Writing. Her research in marine biology, endocrinology, biophysics inspires her blog Dear-Earth.net about “travel science,” alerting travelers as to how climate change now alters our destinations, expectations, and, ultimately, experiences. Encouraged by worldwide grass roots actions, she advocates that each individual walk lightly on this planet and subtract every molecule of carbon dioxide possible. When she’s not on the road, she moonlights as a medical writer, penning such medical thrillers as Norenthindrone. The First Three Decades, the fast-paced history of the first birth control pill extracted from a Mexican yam, mentors fledgling writers, and teaches Creative Writing.