Sandra Millers Younger

Sandra Younger lost her home, twelve neighbors, and almost her own life in the 2003 Cedar Fire–for fourteen years the biggest wildfire in modern California history and a harbinger of today's even more extreme climate-driven fire catastrophes.

A powerful storyteller and career journalist, Sandra felt compelled to capture the Cedar Fire story for posterity, documenting the event from the perspectives of both the firefighters battling the fire and the public caught in its path. First published in 2013, The Fire Outside My Window: A Survivor Tells the Story of California's Historic Cedar Fire, has been hailed as required reading for residents of wildfire country, adopted as a training text for top-level emergency professionals, and featured by national media.

Sandra earned degrees in journalism and English at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Syracuse University. She is also an ICF-credentialed coach and international retreat leader, mentoring other writers in the craft of transformative storytelling. She and her husband, Bob, live on a mountain near San Diego with two incredibly sweet and spoiled Newfoundland dogs.