Rachel Pastan’s novel In the Field, based on the life of Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock, won the inaugural Science + Literature award from the National Book Foundation in 2022. She has also published three other novels: Alena, Lady of the Snakes, and This Side of Married. 

After publishing In the Field, Rachel got more deeply involved in her town of Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, growing concerned about the dramatic rise in housing prices and how it was changing Swarthmore. With others, she advocated for the creation of a Task Force on Development and Affordability and served as its chair. During this time, she began to think about a novel that would inhabit and explore what happens when people who grow up in a town can no longer afford to live there. We’re So Lucky to Live Here grew out of those reflections.

In 2025, Rachel worked with Beth Murray to establish Celia Bookshop. As literary director, she is responsible for the book inventory, event programming, and writing the semimonthly newsletter First Words. Before that, she taught creative writing at Swarthmore College, the Bennington Writing Seminars, and elsewhere. She also served as Editor-at-Large at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, where she developed the popular blog Miranda. She lives a fifteen-minute walk from the bookstore with her spouse and their dog Rosie.