Joey Sheehan trained as an intellectual historian of China at Harvard University, from which she obtained her PhD, at which she taught, and with whose press she published her first book. That book established her reputation as a tenacious researcher as well as a gifted writer.For years, Sheehan has had a consuming passion for air disasters and aviation safety. Her curiousity piqued by a seemingly inexplicable 1979 catasrophe in Antartica she learned about by chance around 2014, she decided to explore whether it would make a promising subject for a new book. She concluded it would. Joey lives on the East Coast of the United States with her husband, AI. Gibbons, and a white ball of fluff named Valentino Ignacio de Villanova.