April D. De Conick

I grew up in rural Michigan, in the northern city, Traverse. My family had a small farm on the Traverse peninsula where I spent my childhood riding horses, climbing pine trees, and swimming in the bay. When I went away to college, I went to the big city (at least I thought it was the big city at the time) Ann Arbor and graduated with a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies in 1993. From there I took an assistant professorship at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, Illinois. I met and married Wade Allen Greiner, a legal aid attorney who was working in Decatur. Our son was born in 2003. In 2006, we moved to Houston, Texas, so that I could join the faculty of the Religious Studies Department at Rice University.