Five years on, she has just started class as a healthy kindergartner.
“To call her a miracle is too simplistic,” says her proud mother, Kelley French, 42. “It was a miracle with a lot of moving pieces.”
Now, inspired by her daughter’s story, the journalism professor at Indiana University in Bloomington has co-written a memoir, “Juniper,” out now, with her Pulitzer Prize-winning husband, Tom French, 58. It chronicles the incredible fight of their micro-preemie, who arrived in the world one day shy of the viability threshold of 24 weeks.