BIOGRAPHY

Andrea’s most recent book is Radical Endurance: Growing Old in an Age of Longevity (University of Minnesota Press, 2024). Praised as “a personal guide to the transformations, hard truths, profound pleasures, and infinite possibilities of aging,” the book traces her journey into old age, including the choking fear of losing her health and with it, her independence; the profound pleasures of “growing up again” as she reconsiders experiences from young adulthood; and finally, her unexpectedly optimistic journey toward contentment as she contemplates her future.

Winner of an Honorable Mention from the Forward Indies 2023 Book Awards, After Effects: A Memoir of Complicated Grief (University of Minnesota Press, 2022) traces Andrea’s deeply personal struggle with abnormally intense and prolonged grief after the untimely death of her husband, ultimately leading to a profound reconsideration of what might constitute happiness in a life alone.

In 2020, Andrea was awarded a Next Step grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board’s Metropolitan Regional Arts Council to support After Effects, and in 2022, she was a featured writer in the Minnesota Humanities Center’s popular Minnesota Writers Series.

Andrea is also the author of Restoring Flexibility: A Gentle Yoga-Based Practice to Increase Mobility at Any Age (Ulysses Press, 2015), which received enthusiastic reviews from yoga, health, and wellness media and continues to find an appreciative audience.

Andrea is currently working on a travel memoir tentatively titled “Somewhere Over the Rainbow: An Art Lover’s Life-Changing Journey into Native America.” To support this work, she was awarded a 2024 professional development grant from the University of Minnesota Retirees Association. Here is an edited excerpt from the book’s introduction:

“For many years, I had been yearning to write about the annual road trips my husband and I had taken during the 1990s to northern Minnesota, the Great Plains, and southwestern North America. What was it about those journeys, my writing self wondered, that made them so precious? Was it the fact that they ended tragically when my husband died in the prime of his life? I could not shake the feeling that somehow, for reasons I could not rein in, I owed it to myself to explore whether it was possible to write about these cherished trips in a way that might illuminate the spiritual purpose that compelled them and the motivations that shaped our routes and nourished our natures.

“That nagging feeling always led me to the outsized plastic storage container hogging the only shelf in my bedroom closet. In it rested, as though in patient suspension, my collection of about 180 exquisite examples of contemporary Native American beadwork that I had purchased during the restorative summer road trips my husband and I had taken thirty years earlier, the same vacations that I had hoped for so long to write about.

“Finally, I began to realize that if I could write ethically and purposefully about these extraordinary artworks I might create a meaningful, honorable true story. Equally important, as I wrote about these beloved artworks (all made expressly for sale, not for ceremony), I could also write meaningfully and without artifice about other aspects of our road trips, especially about my travel companion, the man who drove the Chevy Blazer and watched over me at every moment, a beloved partner in life and a perfect mate on the road. 

“Every trip we took included an intentional search for beauty and essence in contemporary Native American art, especially objects that exist simultaneously as original, present-day expressions of the artists who created them and visible tributes to the specific cultures that made their art possible. Equally essential, each trip was also a visceral, wholly emotional sojourn in the splendiferous lands that the people who create this exquisite art call home. Therein lay the sacred nature of the road trips that enabled my husband and me to fly like bluebirds over distant rainbows into places in Native America that had been completely unknown to me for the first four decades of my provincial mainstream non-Native midwestern life.”

Andrea founded and directed LearningLife, the University of Minnesota’s diverse collection of learning opportunities for people in the second half of life, as well as Encore Transitions: Preparing for Post-Career Life, a trailblazing, nationally replicated program that offered a holistic approach to preparing for a meaningful life after retirement. These programs allowed her to develop an enduring professional and personal interest in health, well-being, and vital engagement in later life, concerns that have become foundational to her writing. 

As the founding director of the University of Minnesota’s legendary Split Rock Arts Program, Andrea led an internationally renowned series of intensive residential workshops in the literary and visual arts. During her tenure, she put cultural, racial, gender, and aesthetic diversity at the heart of the program by bringing groundbreaking writers and artists of color and pioneering LGBTQ+ artists to the program, and by offering program participants opportunities to learn non-European art forms from master practitioners.

In 1995, in collaboration with the University of Minnesota’s Department of American Indian Studies, Andrea also founded and directed American Indian Lives, Lands, and Cultures travel study tours to tribal nations. The program offered opportunities for members of participating tribal communities to create curriculum and serve as teachers in order to develop their capacity in intercultural tourism. This work grew from Andrea’s abiding interest in and passion for Native American art, especially contemporary beadwork created for sale to tourists.

Between 2010 and 2018, Andrea taught hundreds of yoga classes through her Third Age Yoga teaching practice, working with a wide variety of participants ranging from 45 to 98 years old. She taught exclusively in community-based nonprofit settings, including the West 7th Community Center and the Wilder Foundation Center for Aging, both located in Saint Paul, Minnesota, Andrea’s home town.