BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Jody Solow is a biologist and social scientist currently writing a series of books based on her life and research in some of the most remote parts of the world. Her books seek to shed new light on climate, inequality, and reimagined possibilities for a just and healthy world. As an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Solow pioneered a method of studying wild dolphins that is now used by researchers worldwide. Her method involved emitting a high-pitched noise, or “signature call,” while swimming with wild spinner dolphins off the coasts of Maui, Lana’i and Hawai’i islands. The call allowed the dolphins to recognize her and accept her in their midst. Solow’s work was discussed in an article in Scientific American (March 1979), in which the writer compared her research to that of Jane Goodall. Her work has also appeared in Dolphin Days (Norris 1991: Norton Press) and The Hawaiian Spinner Dolphin (Norris et al 1994: UC Press) of which she is a coauthor.
Upon graduating with Bachelor of Arts degrees in Biology and in Environmental Studies, Solow worked in Alaska researching beluga whales, sea birds and grizzly bears. She then traveled to Kenya as a wildlife biologist with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. She learned rudimentary Swahili from disabled beggars on the streets of Nairobi before heading to Kenya’s arid Northern Frontier District, where she traveled on foot and by camel with three tribes of camel-herding nomads conducting wildlife surveys and researching cultural and ecological aspects of nomadic pastoralism. She made three journeys through the rocky Northern Frontier District over a period of five years. These journeys, including a walk across the desolate 120-degree Chalbi Desert and a love story with a man named Bante, a Gabra nomad, are the topic of her memoir Across a Stone Sea, for which she has a 275-page first draft. Before returning to California, Solow hitchhiked on oil tankers through war-torn Uganda and Rwanda to visit the mountain gorillas. Later, she worked for five months with Cynthia Moss on an elephant project in Kenya.
Funded by a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship, Solow returned to Africa as a graduate student in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley—twice to Kenya’s desert, and in 1986 she visited West Africa to research a potential project for her doctoral work: how nomads adapt to a variety of ecosystems. Though nomads lack a permanent residence, she searched for and found three nomadic tribes: the Imraguen (nomadic fishers on the coast of Mauritania who fish with the help of dolphins), the Bozo (nomadic fishers and hippo hunters on the River Niger in Mali), and the slowly disappearing Nemadi (the last tribe of nomadic hunters in the Sahara).
After completing her master’s degree at UC Berkeley, Solow became a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography at Cambridge University, England. Funded by two Fulbright Awards and research grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Institute for the Study of World Politics, and Cambridge University, she spent twenty-two months researching cultural ecology and environmental history in the Solomon Islands. Upon Solow’s return, work on her dissertation was cut short by a recurrence of meningoencephalitis, a debilitating brain virus that she contracted from a fly bite on the border of Rwanda and Zaire. Due to the recurring inability to access words, she followed the suggestion of a neurologist and began to paint, realizing she could express herself with lines, shapes, and color.
Today, Solow lives, writes, and paints in Maine, where she has recovered from the encephalitis and a craniotomy performed in December 2013 to remove a brain tumor. In January 2016 she completed Stanford University’s 2-year graduate Online Writing Certificate in creative nonfiction. Inspired by the wisdom of Solomon Islands chiefs, religious leaders and others who shared their insights on the environment, humanity, God and money, Solow is writing Dry Water, Blue Clouds, an eco-adventure-memoir—Avatar meets the climate crisis—based on her research in the islands.
