Archives West Finding Aid

The daughter of Italian immigrants, Irene Giovanini Kiefer was born on November 1, 1926, in Red Lodge, Montana, where her father worked as a coal miner and on the Beartooth Highway. Her family moved to Butte in August, 1933, where her parents ran a small grocery store. She attended Butte public schools. Irene continued as a student at Montana State College (MSC) from 1944-1948, where she majored in chemistry and participated in college theatricals. She was also an honors student. After graduating from MSC, she was offered employment at Dupont Chemical and Monsanto Company. She accepted the higher-paying position in the Acetate Research Division of the Rayon Department of Dupont's Waynesboro, Virginia, facility. At Dupont, Giovanini "worked on research and pilot plant production of Orlon acrylic fiber," helping establish the first Orlon production plant in Camden, South Carolina, then transferred to work at the Dupont research station in Wilmington, Delaware (Montana Standard, June 7, 1953). In 1951, Giovanini took a job at the Sheffield Tube Company in New London, Connecticut, before starting a new position in the Editorial Department of Chemical and Engineering News, a publication of the American Chemical Society. In 1953, Giovanini was invited back to MSC to deliver the Women's Day address. In 1955, she married David Kiefer of Pittsburgh, who also worked at Chemical and Engineering News, and returned to work in 1965 after her two children were both in school. For the next 25 years she worked for various governmental agencies and private governmental contractors and consulting firms as an editor and technical writer, primarily on preparing science-based research for public release. She wrote articles for various magazines and newspapers, including the Washington Post and Smithsonian. Giovanini went on to write multiple books, published under her married name, Irene Kiefer. Many of these publications were aimed at young audiences, on topics relating to science, hazardous waste and energy and the environment. These include: Underground Furnaces: The Story of Geothermal Energy (Morrow, 1976); Global Jigsaw Puzzle: The Story of Continental Drift (Atheneum, 1978); Energy for America (Atheneum, 1979); Poisoned Land: The Problem of Hazardous Waste (Atheneum, 1981); Nuclear Energy at the Crossroads (Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing, 1982). She died September 22, 2010, in Belmont, Massachusetts.