Catharina Coenen is a first-generation German immigrant to Northwestern Pennsylvania, where she teaches biology at Allegheny College. Her essays have been noted in The Best American Essays and appeared in The Best of the Net, The Threepenny Review, The American Scholar, The Christian Science Monitor, and elsewhere. Catharina is the recipient of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, a Flash Nonfiction Prize from The Forge Literary Magazine, the Appalachian Review’s Denny Plattner Creative Nonfiction Prize, a Creative Nonfiction Foundation Science as Story Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Hedgebrook Residency. She co-hosts the International Women’s Writing Guild’s Online Open Mic series and writes about science, family, fascism, and war.