Bio
Lucy received her M.A. in English and M.F.A. in creative writing at San Francisco State University, and her B.A. in biological sciences, M.A. in zoology, and Ph.D. in science and mathematics education at the University of California at Berkeley. She studied poetry with Kathleen Fraser, Daniel Langton, Josephine Miles, Toni Mirosevich, and Stan Rice; and fiction and creative nonfiction with Nona Caspers, Molly Giles, Robert Glück, Leo Litwak, and Frances Mayes.
Currently a staff scientist at Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute, she previously served for six years as a science writer and administrator at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and for 17 years as the director of the Hall of Health, an interactive children’s museum in Berkeley. She has also worked as a freelance writer, technical writer/editor, school-district math/science specialist, math/science education consultant, and college lecturer. She is the founder and director of a small press, Scarlet Tanager Books.
Rebellious and willful as a teenager, Lucy first married at age 14 and gave birth at 15. Between the ages of 14 and 17, she did not attend school. In addition to mothering during these years, she worked as a sales representative for Beauty Counselor Cosmetics, a phone girl at Chicken Delight, and a gas station attendant. These experiences kindled her enthusiasm for academics.
She is of British, Swiss/German, and Native American descent. Her father, Richard Lang, was a banker and photographer, her mother, Evelyn, a homemaker. Her ancestors include a lecturer in Hebrew at Oxford University in the 16th century, a man who fell off the Mayflower during a storm and was hauled back on board with a fish hook, the first person executed in Plymouth Colony (for murder), a woman who was whipped at the post for adultery, a Revolutionary War sergeant who fathered 22 children, a teenager who joined the Union Army and served in a regiment that was decimated by yellow fever, a man who traveled from Massachusetts to California twice during the Gold Rush but did not get rich, a Caucasian housekeeper who bore the illegitimate daughter of a Wampanoag man, and many other people who did wondrous, courageous, or despicable things and did or did not survive.
The mother of two grown daughters and grandmother of three, Lucy currently baby-sits often and lives in Oakland with her husband, writer Richard Michael Levine.
