About Rasa

Rasa Gustaitis has worked as a journalist for more than sixty years, starting as a reporter at the Washington Post in 1960, moving on to the New York Herald Tribune. She has been an editor and writer at the Pacific News Service, several magazines, has taught journalism at San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley, and written for a variety of periodicals.

Her book Turning On (Macmillan 1968) explored changing life-styles linked to psychedelic experiences and Eastern philosophies. It took her to San Francisco, where she settled in 1968. In Wholly Round (1973, Holt, Reinhart and Winston), she delved into the ecology movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. In A Time to be Born, A Time to Die - Conflicts and Ethics in an Intensive Care Nursery (1986 Addison Wesley) co-authored with Ernlé Young, 1986, she took an intimate look at the effects of neonatal technology on the lives of extremely frail newborns and their families. That book It grew out of a study Gustaitis undertook while she was a Professional Journalism Fellow at Stanford University in 1983-84. From 1986 through 2009, she was the editor of California Coast & Ocean, a quarterly magazine dedicated to the protection of the California’s coast for people and wildlife.