Lucille Lang Day


Lucille Lang Day is an American poet, writer, and science and health educator. Day has authored or edited 18 books and is a contributor to over 50 anthologies. She is best known as a poet and writer for her award-winning memoir, Married at Fourteen: A True Story, for her integration of science imagery and concepts into poetry and for advocating use of poetry as a tool in environmental activism. As a science and health educator, her many achievements have included promoting science education for girls and serving as codirector of Health and Biomedical Science for a Diverse Community, a project that was funded by the National Institutes of Health and aimed to make biomedical science more accessible to underrepresented minorities.

Early life and education

Lucille Lang Day was born December 5, 1947, as Lucille Elizabeth Lang in Oakland, California, the only child of Richard Allen Lang and Evelyn Marietta Lang. Raised in Oakland and nearby Piedmont, California, she had a turbulent adolescence during which she married at age 14 and gave birth to her first child at age 15. She went on to earn a B.A. in biological sciences from the University of California, Berkeley, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa with great distinction. She received her M.A. in zoology from the University of California, Berkeley, followed by her Ph.D. in science and mathematics education at the same university. Day also holds an M.A. in English and MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University.

Career

With Joan Skolnick and Carol Langbort, in 1982 Day coauthored How to Encourage Girls in Math and Science: Strategies for Parents and Educators. This book grew out of the Novato Math/Science Sex Desegregation Project, Novato Unified School District, Novato, California, where Day had worked as a math/science specialist from 1979 to 1981. During the 1980s, Day taught chemistry and biology at Laney College in Oakland, and worked as a science writer, administrator, and manager of precollege education programs at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Serving from 1992 to 2009 as director of the Hall of Health, a museum in Berkeley that was sponsored by UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland, she did research entitled “Prevention of Substance Abuse: Can Museums Make a Difference?" with Randi S. Cartmill, and she also conducted research to determine the "Impact of a Field Trip to a Health Museum on Children’s Health-related Behaviors and Perceived Control over Illness." Her research on "Teaching About Genetics and Sickle Cell Disease in Fifth Grade" was conducted as part of Health and Biomedical Science for a Diverse Community, which she co-directed with Bertram H. Lubin, M.D., President and CEO of Children’s Hospital Oakland, and which included the development and testing of a 40-lesson curriculum entitled SEEK .
In the 1970s, Day joined a writers' collective, the Berkeley Poets Cooperative, whose members included such poets as Marcia Falk, Clive Matson, and Alicia Ostriker, and soon began publishing her poetry in such journals as The Hudson Review and The Threepenny Review. She has published hundreds of poems and dozens of essays, articles, and short stories in magazines and anthologies, often drawing on her background in science. Additional themes found in her poetry include history, ancestry, and motherhood. In 1999, she founded Scarlet Tanager Books, which publishes poetry, fiction, and literary nonfiction by West Coast writers. She is a member of PEN America, the National Association of Science Writers and the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment. In 2020, she was elected to the PEN Oakland board of directors.

Awards & honors

As a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, Day received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. In 1982, U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky, along with David Littlejohn and Michael Rubin, selected her first poetry collection, Self-Portrait with Hand Microscope, for the Joseph Henry Jackson Award from the San Francisco Foundation. Day won the Blue Light Poetry Prize, a national award, in 2014 for Dreaming of Sunflowers: Museum Poems. Her memoir, Married at Fourteen: A True Story, won the national PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award in 2013 and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in Creative Nonfiction that same year.  In 2017, she received a second PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award for Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California, an anthology she coedited with Lakota poet Kurt Schweigman. Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California, which she co-edited with Ruth Nolan, has been widely praised by poets, scholars, and environmentalists. Both Red Indian Road West and Fire and Rain have received Literary/Cultural Arts Awards from Artists Embassy International.

Personal life

Day is married to writer Richard Michael Levine and they live in Oakland, California. She has two daughters, Liana Sherrine Day and Tamarind Channah Fleischman, from previous marriages and four grandchildren. She is of Wampanoag, British, and Swiss/German descent.

Science education