Benjamin Rubenstein is a speaker, podcaster, acclaimed storyteller, and author of two books and essays in anthologies, literary reviews, and popular websites. His talks and writing, both fiction and nonfiction, combine humor and reallness that inspire others to adapt to their challenges.

That humor and reallness reveal themselves in his memoir for ages 10 and up, Secrets of the Cancer-Slaying Super Man, and in his memoir for adults, Twice: How I Became a Cancer-Slaying Super Man Before I Turned 21, which book reviewer Bookphile called, “the single-most harrowing book I have ever read in my life.” The books are about his experiences with severe illness as a teenager.

Benjamin was diagnosed with Ewing’s sarcoma, a bone cancer, when he was 16. He spent much of his junior year of high school at the National Institutes of Health Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, getting chemotherapy and radiotherapy and rehabilitating from the surgery that left him without his left hip bone. A year later, one of the chemo drugs he’d received to treat Ewing’s caused genetic mutations that led to myelodysplastic syndrome, a cancer of the bone marrow. Treatment for that at the University of Minnesota Medical Center included a bone marrow transplant from the cells of a stranger’s umbilical cord. He dealt with these experiences through obsessive focus and by creating unbreakable life rules and the delusion that he was superhuman.

Benjamin graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in economics and earned his Master of Fine Arts in creative writing degree from University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast program. He’s earned a certificate in advanced communication from Toastmasters International and an award for writing in plain English from the federal government, where he has taught others how to write clearly.

He has been featured in The Washington Post and Washington Jewish Week, and has appeared on Jimmy Moore's Livin' La Vida Low-Carb Show and in the feature-length documentary, Cancer Rebellion.