Following Rebecca Skloot on Twitter

About 175 million people use Twitter, and one frequent user of Twitter is Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. She currently has over 10,000 followers, myself included! Recently, I have been following her tweets, some of which are very interesting.

Skloot excitedly tweeted on January 5th that her novel has now hit the shelves in France.

Relating to one of the themes in her book, the theme of moral ethics in the health sciences field, Skloot tweeted an interesting article on January 6th, “Class Decides Whether to Donate Professor’s Kidney”, about a class at St. Mary’s College of Maryland that had to write a final paper on whether or not their professor should donate his extra kidney and if he was doing something morally wrong if he did not donate. More on this article can be found here. Another one of her recent tweets relates to this same theme of moral ethics. Skloot tweeted the article, “Real, Live Practice Babies”, that discovers the use of infants from orphanages as “practice babies” in home economics programs at elite U.S. colleges. After about two years of caring for the infants, they would be brought back to the orphanages. More on this interesting article can be found here.

 

Skloot’s tweets include interesting topics and articles that relate to her award-winning novel, but she also tweets about her everyday life and about where she is around the country, meeting with students or giving book talks similiar to our Go Big Read author event at the Kohl Center. If you have a Twitter account, Skloot is one to follow. Don’t forget that our program, Go Big Read, also has a Twitter account that you can follow as well.

 

Jessica Waala Undergraduate Student