Lynn Stansbury

LYNN STANSBURY started telling herself bedtime stories as a little girl left alone in the dark and haunted by pictures in Life magazine of Nazi concentration camp victims. All of her fiction reaches back to these origins: the need to find—and give—sanctuary even in the simplest things and to face evil in the world, even when the worst is in ourselves.

Lynn served in the Peace Corps in Guatemala in 1968-69 just as that country was sinking into what would stretch into thirty years of genocidal civil war. Her novel-in-stories, Not All Dead Together, due out from Chin Music Press in April 2025, grew from that time and the people she knew and loved there. She finished a BA in art history in 1970, helped start community clinics in California, went on to public health and medical training in Hawaii, and then to live and work all over the US and Polynesia.

After the Army transferred her family to San Francisco in 1986, Lynn spent seven years as a primary care physician for a farmworkers’ clinic in the Sonoma wine country and then, when the Army moved the family to Washington DC in 1993, eleven years as a contract physician to the National Institutes of Health Occupational Medical Service before joining the research group at Maryland Shock Trauma. In 2013, she and her husband escaped west again to the Gray Havens, AKA, Seattle. Their jointly authored medical textbook, Massive Transfusion, was published by the AABB Press in 2019. Lynn holds master's degrees in creative writing from Johns Hopkins and the University of Washington, remains active in trauma research at Harborview Medical Center through the UW Departments of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology and of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine, serves as a regular reviewer for the medical journal Transfusion and a fiction editor for The Baltimore Review, and keeps track of family in California and New Zealand.