About Erin

Bio

Erin M. Bank lives, works, runs, and writes in San Francisco, CA. By day, she has an administrative job at an academic university. By night and early morning, she writes with an insatiable curiosity.

Erin was born in Tucson, AZ. Her family moved to Northfield, MN when she was seven, so she considers the Midwest her true roots. She still has the collection of spiral-bound notebooks holding the stories she’d write late at night, her first foray into creative writing. As a student at the University of Rochester in New York, she started down the lab rat career path, earning a BS in Biochemistry. She was one of those weird scientists who also enjoyed pulling all-nighters to write essays for her literature and history electives. She went directly on to graduate school at the Weill Cornell Medical College on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, earning a PhD in Pharmacology for her work studying the parasite that causes malaria. She enjoyed defending the placement of “that” versus “which” as much as the scientific conclusions of her experiments. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Erin wrote and edited nearly every word of English that was produced by her lab, from emails to publications to grants, and once again discovered her love of the written word. Upon her return to the US, she spent time freelancing and consulting as a science editor and writer, which led to a role at UCSF writing and editing grant proposals. She now manages one of these large grants, a great team, and strategic planning processes. Her favorite days on the job are those she gets to write and collaborate with smart people. When she has time, she is available for grant writing and consulting work.

Erin’s website, bankoferin.com, was inspired by her love of learning, researching, talking about, and writing about a wide range of subjects. Although she doesn’t purport to be a technical expert in everything she writes about, she doesn’t believe in limiting curiosity. The website is a playground, a space to exchange ideas and information, without believing that inner critic that insists we should dedicate our lives to a single topic in order to be able to have–and publish–our opinions and ideas.

An important element of this website is her blog, The Latent Lollygagger, where Bank reveals her personal struggles and successes in the face of depression and anxiety. It is featured as a Feedspot Top 30 Depression Blog.

Erin Bank Bank writes for the Sunset Beacon/Richmond Review newspapers, and has been published in The Frisc, The Bold Italic, and SF Weekly. Her fiction has been published in the Adelaide literary journal. She has taken classes at the Writer’s Studio, Writing Salon, and the Grotto in San Francisco. She has participated in writing retreats coached by Jen Louden, Lisa Jones, Marianne Elliot, and Laurie Wagner. She is querying her first women’s fiction novel.

When she’s not sitting at a desk, Erin Bank is running the trails of Marin County and Golden Gate Park, walking along the beach with her husband and dog, remembering how to play piano, trying to learn how to surf and kite surf, and keeping her streak alive with the NY Times crossword puzzle.

Totally unrelated to writing, if you’re looking for the Google calendar for SF Ocean Beach tides, here you go: