Longleaf Express author, Andrew Sleeth, was born and bred in Montgomery Co., Maryland, and has been living almost continuously in North Carolina since 1986 (save for a year’s stint in Westchester Co., New York).
Along with an undergraduate degree in religion from Taylor University, Andrew has done graduate study at both Duke Divinity School in Durham and the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication in Chapel Hill.
His professional history spins a yarn almost too elaborate to unravel, and begins at age 16 at the National Bureau of Standards (present-day National Institute of Standards and Technology) operating quarter-million dollar spark source mass spectrometers used in analytical chemistry research. However, Andrew’s first “real” job was in the area of health physics and radiation protection with the U.S. Navy, where he performed a function that was the only one of its kind in the world.
Along the way, he forayed into the woodworking trade, starting with commercial custom cabinetry and advancing into furniture making. At one small shop, he built custom bedroom suites of solid wood that cost more than his annual salary.
Following a brief reprise in radiation protection, Andrew managed waste reduction and recycling services for a large state university. He subsequently spent years with the publishing industry in various editorial capacities producing peer-reviewed professional journals, including the world’s first basic science journal devoted to the study of AIDS, and another that claimed Clint Eastwood among its editorial board (along with a few other notables).
More recently, Andrew has plied his skills as a public relations practitioner, serving in state public affairs roles within military and environmental organizations.
Andrew is a naturalist, photographer and backpacker who loves nothing more than to arm himself with an orienteering compass and USGS quadrangle maps, and set out into the wilderness. He’s especially fond of Croatan National Forest, which hosts some of the nation’s largest remaining tracts of longleaf pine savanna. The rest of the time he lives in Raleigh, keeping 
company with a wild horde of chow-hound birds and two small, furry mammals (species, felis catus) who give him no end of grief.
