Book Discussion Group Meeting, Saturday, February 3, 2018, 2:00 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly 

Ms. Shetterly's biography is taken from the usual unimpeachable source, Wikipedia. I could have done more research to verify if it is accurate, but I chose to accept it as gospel.

Margot Lee was born in 1969 in Hampton, Virginia. Her father worked as a research scientist at NASA-Langley Research Center, and her mother was an English professor at the historically black Hampton University. Lee grew up knowing many African-American families with members who worked at NASA. She attended Phoebus High School and graduated from the University of Virginia's McIntire School of Commerce.

After college, Lee moved to New York and worked several years in investment banking: first on the Foreign Exchange trading desk at J.P. Morgan, then on Merrill Lynch's Fixed Income Capital Markets desk. She shifted to the media industry, working at a variety of startup ventures, including the HBO-funded website Volume.com. She married writer Aran Shetterly.

In 2005, the Shetterlys moved to Mexico to found an English-language magazine called Inside Mexico. Directed to the numerous English-speaking expats in the country, it operated until 2009. From 2010 through 2013, the couple worked as content marketing and editorial consultants to the Mexican tourism industry.

Shetterly began researching and writing Hidden Figures in 2010. In 2014, she sold the film rights to the book to William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins, and it was optioned by Donna Gigliotti of Levantine Films. The Fox 2000 feature film was released in 2016, and stars Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe, and Kevin Costner.

In 2013, Shetterly founded The Human Computer Project, an organization whose mission is to archive the work of all of the women who worked as computers and mathematicians in the early days of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

A Hidden Figures children's book will be released in January 2018. The book will be co-written by Shetterly and will be geared towards children four to eight years old.

The video below is from Al-Jazeera America and is a discussion about Hidden Figures and women in STEM with a panel including Margot Shetterly plus a mechanical engineering student and the first African American woman to get a degree in astrophysics from Yale.