Jessica Leigh Hester is a PhD candidate in History at Johns Hopkins University. Her research examines social and political organizing in response to grave robbings perpetrated by and for medical schools in the nineteenth-century United States. Also a journalist and essayist, her work has appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Smithsonian, and more, and chosen as a notable selection in The Best American Science and Nature Writing. Her first book, Sewer, was published by Bloomsbury. She is now at work on a book about trace fossils, forthcoming with Random House. Jessica received her undergraduate education at the University of Chicago and an MFA in Creative Writing from Hunter College.