Wordfest Presents Cat Bohannon

Wordfest Presents Cat Bohannon

Wordfest presents Cat Bohannon and her illuminating new book Eve: How the Female Body Drove 2000 Million Years of Human Evolution. The conversation starts at 7PM MT and will be hosted by Dr. Fiona Mattatall. This event includes an audience Q & A and book signing, fuelled by Shelf Life Books.

We are grateful to Penguin Random House Canada for making it possible for Wordfest to connect you with Cat Bohannon.

About Eve: How the Female Body Drove 2000 Million Years of Human Evolution

An ambitious, eye-opening, myth-busting and groundbreaking history of the evolution of the female body, by a brilliant new researcher and writer.

Why do women live longer than men? Why do women have menopause? Why are women more likely to get Alzheimer’s? Why do girls score better at every academic subject than boys until puberty, when suddenly their scores plummet? And does the female brain really exist?

In Eve, Cat Bohannon answers questions scientists should have been addressing for decades. With boundless curiosity and sharp wit, she covers the past 200 million years to explain the specific science behind the development of the female sex. Eve is not only a sweeping revision of human history, it’s an urgent and necessary corrective for a world that has focused primarily on the male body for far too long. Bohannon’s findings, including everything from the way C-sections in the industrialized world are rearranging women’s pelvic shape to the surprising similarities between pus and breast milk, will completely change what you think you know about evolution and why Homo sapiens have become such a successful and dominant species, from tool use to city building to the development of language.

A 21st-century update of Our Bodies, Ourselves, Eve offers a true paradigm shift in our thinking about what the female body is and why it matters.

About Cat Bohannon

Cat Bohannon is a researcher and author with a Ph.D. from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her essays and poems have appeared in Scientific American, Mind, Science Magazine, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Georgia Review, The Story Collider, and Poets Against the War. She lives with her family in Seattle.

About Host Fiona Mattatall

Dr. Fiona Mattatall is a Royal College certified specialist in Obstetrics and Gynaecology. She attended medical school at Queen’s University, where her research projects were in the areas of History of Medicine and women’s health.  One of her projects was exploring her grandmother’s education and career as a midwife in Ireland in the 1930s.  This led her to consider specializing in Obstetrics and Gynaecology. Mattatall did her residency at Dalhousie University where her research projects were in the areas of obstetrics (birth plans, intrapartum death).

In 2005 she joined a group of general Obstetrician Gynaecologists at Rockyview General Hospital where she continues to work and teach. She is also an OBGYN with the team at Chrysalis Clinic and also works as a gynaecologist for the transgender community in Calgary. When not in the clinic or hospital, Dr. Mattatall can be found hiking or at a concert with her family.