Michelle B. Slater

Michelle Slater is the author of Soul Mate Dog, a memoir of a unique twenty-first century love story that encompasses how we love and how we grieve, as well as how we live day-to-day with our animals.

A lifelong lover of dogs, in Soul Mate Dog, Slater tells the story of her beloved German shepherd Brady’s devastating battle with leptospirosis (a serious bacterial infection) and kidney failure, a battle they fought tirelessly together and conquered—thanks to the sophistication of emergency veterinary medicine, the power of alternative holistic modalities, animal communication, and unconditional love.

Slater has lectured about the complicated human-animal relationship at conferences, and written articles on it as well, including “Rethinking Human-Animal Ontological Differences: Derrida’s ‘Animot’ and Cixous’s ‘Fips’,” published in Contemporary French and Francophone Studies.

Slater is a scholar of comparative literature and president of the educational non-profit Mayapple Center for the Arts and Humanities in Connecticut. She holds a Ph.D. in French literature from Johns Hopkins University. She is also is the author of Starving to Heal in Siberia: My Radical Recovery from Late-Stage Lyme Disease, a moving and insightful memoir of recovery from devastating chronic illness and a practical guide to the science and psychology behind safely dry fasting.