I am a high-school drop out that went from GED to Ph.D. Currently. I am Professor of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies in the Social Transformation Studies department at Kansas State University. 

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Bits of my story (and my family's stories) can be found in my book. Here's an excerpt:

In early 2005 I was desperately trying to find a job. I had defended my dissertation the fall before and was now teaching as an adjunct. Money was tight and I couldn’t take out any more student loans. I had sent out dozens of tenure-track job applications. No bites. I was sending out applications for instructor and visiting professor jobs. Stuck in the same tiny apartment I’d lived in throughout grad school, I looked for a way out. Out of what I wasn’t sure, but my plans to be a college professor seemed futile. Could I find work elsewhere? In government? Maybe I could even go back to school and get a degree with potential outside academia? That’s a depressing thought. Then I remembered a book I had bought years before, The Self-Sufficient Life and How to Live It by John Seymour. Reading it again, I delighted in the drawings of smallholdings with neat rows of vegetables, berries, and fruit trees complete with chickens free ranging in the orchard. Step-by-step instructions outlined the self-sufficient agrarian life season by season. It made sense. It was doable. I breathed deep. My tense shoulders dropped. Despite the fact that I had avoided garden work with Dad in my tweens and teens, despite my lack of real farming experience or knowledge, I thought, “This. This is my way out.”  p. 15

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Here's a story about my granma and granpa:

Granma and Grampa lived in the Mexican part of San Antonio (they were always “Granma” and “Grampa,” not abuelo/abuela or grandfather/grandmother. I don’t know why). Grampa was a stone mason, although he would do any work when needed—he sold raspas, delivered ice, and peddled the discarded vegetables he picked up as they were being tossed because of wilt from the icebox railcars on their way up from the Rio Grande Valley. Granma was a maid for several white ladies. I heard stories of how, to be able to take off a few days to give birth, Granma would clean all the white ladies’ houses in the same week, then give birth, then go back to work the next week. Granma also was also a keen homemaker and, surprisingly for the urban area, quite good at procuring small livestock. According to family lore, Granma would send my mom and her sister out to the annual Easter chick and baby bunny giveaways at local businesses. At these events, each child could get a baby bunny or chick to take home as a pet. “Tell them that you want one for your little brother too,” Granma would say. They each went from business to business, and made sure to get one for their little brother too. Every year, the family would have a flock of chickens for eggs and a clutch of rabbits for meat.  p. 66

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