Family:

My wife Mary E. Steen is Associate Professor Emerita of English and former chair of the Department of English at St. Olaf College, where she taught from 1965 to 2009. In addition to teaching regular courses in first year and creative writing, she has taught writing courses on the theme of "chance and choice" and courses on the literature of New Zealand and Australia. In the 1980s we team-taught a course in science writing in which students wrote and presented to each other short expository essays on topics in natural, mathematical, social, or behavioral sciences.

Mary is a former member of the Board of Directors of the Minnesota League of Women Voters (LWV-MN) and 2009 winner of the Hope Washburn Award for Outstanding Service to LWV-MN. From 1998 to 2005 she served as editor of The Voter, the newsletter of LWV-MN. In 1995 she attended the World Conference on Women in Beijing and in 1999 she visited Northern Ireland as part of a delegation preparing for a February 2000 Peace Prize Forum at St. Olaf focused on the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to Northern Irish political leaders John Hume and David Trimble. Subsequently she served on the planning committee for the 2004 Forum that honored the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jimmy Carter.

Our older daughter Margaret Steen is a free-lance writer and instructor at UC Berkeley Extension. Her specialties include workplace issues, economics, non-profits, and business writing. Previously she reported on business, real estate, and philanthropy for the San Jose Mercury News and on computer news for InfoWorld. Her husband David Webster works for the "big data" firm Collective. They have two sons: Clark and Harrison.

Our younger daughter Catherine Wille, the mother of Justin, Jonathan, and Joshua, lives in Rochert, Minnesota. Her husband Jason Wille is a computer programmer who telecommutes to work on various enterprise software products.

Since retiring Mary and I have been developing a Frost-Steen Family History & Genealogy website that contains information, photographs, stories, and reminiscences from our extended families. An associated Family Tree displays on-line the contents of a growing family database that now includes information--sometimes only a name--on more than 2500 individuals. We welcome additions and corrections.