Leilani Grajeda-Higley was born in Tampico on the Gulf Coast of Mexico to a Mexican mother and a Chicano father. She began to speak in both Spanish and English simultaneously, but ...view moreLeilani Grajeda-Higley was born in Tampico on the Gulf Coast of Mexico to a Mexican mother and a Chicano father. She began to speak in both Spanish and English simultaneously, but had to relearn Spanish in college after her father punished it out of her while still in Mexico. That early trauma likely sowed the seeds of rebellion and questioning authority driven by her desire to make sense of human behavior, oppression, and power.
She grew up and was educated in the California southwest. She holds degrees in nursing, psychology, and creative writing, and studied the limbic brain informally at the University of California at San Diego. She worked in psychiatry as a nurse therapist, but left it after hearing the late Joseph Campbell tell people to “...follow your bliss.” Her bliss is the written word. She taught writing and literature at San Diego State University. At the end of each class, she would urge her students to “make the world better.” Now an Emerita of SDSU, her book, Power—A Memoir is the culmination of decades of gathered wisdom told with humor and compassion.
She wrote the book Understanding Pharmacology: A Physiological Approach, to make a difficult subject easier for nurses to understand. She is now preparing for publication her late mother’s collection of letters written during W.W. II to her husband at sea.
Of all her hobbies, her favorite is thinking and making the complex easy to understand.view less