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Personal Stories
About Me — Alicia Prater
More than a scientist
I have been a writer for as long as I can remember. We had creative writing projects in Kindergarten or 1st grade where we’d color in the car or some other general object and then write three sentences about it using the new words we’d learned for colors and shapes and sizes. I would fill the front of the page and the back of the page, and then the teacher had to staple more pages onto it. I spent the summer on the old typewriter my mother kept in the closet rewriting and elaborating those “drafts”. I was determined to publish them one day (I haven’t).
Origins
I grew up on a horse farm in rural Indiana. My dad was Indiana born and bred, but my mom was from the Bronx. Because we wanted adventure, my brother and I would ride our bikes to the cow and pig farm down the road and run around barefoot where we weren’t supposed to. I know what it feels like to have a face healing from the many papercut-like strikes of corn stalk leaves because we decided to shortcut through a field too early in the season. That’s something I only needed to do once. I think I was 8.
I left Indiana when I was 22. I didn’t have a brother any more at that point, but I did have a Bachelors of Science in Biochemistry from Indiana University-Bloomington and a…