For Women’s History Month, we’re bringing you #Women Write the World, daily posts of National Book Award honored women authors whose nonfiction writing on matters here and abroad set new standards for American expository literature.

Devra Davis, a world-renowned epidemiologist, examined the impact of catastrophic levels of industrial pollution on her hometown of Donora, Pennsylvania and towns and cities across America. Her conclusion that pollution-related toxins contributed to countless deaths and illnesses became the basis of When Smoke Ran Like Water, a 2002 Finalist for the National Book Award.