Lori Hope, author, essayist, producer and public speaker, whose top-rated cancer support book, “Help Me Live: 20 Things People With Cancer Want You to Know,” lost her own battle with lung cancer, Thursday, Sept. 27, 2012. A native St. Louisan who grew up here, Ms. Hope made her home in Oakland, Calif. for 19 and a half years. She was 58.

Lori Hope Crasilneck (she later changed her name to Lori Hope) was born in St. Louis on Oct. 27, 1953. She was the daughter of Norman Crasilneck and Ellen Moskow Crasilneck, and the stepdaughter of Judith Price Leonard. She was a graduate of Washington University with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and critical writing. She resided in St. Louis until the mid-1980s. She taught documentary production in San Francisco at the Bay Area Video Coalition, a non-commercial media access and training center, for more than a decade. She also worked at the Bay Area Jewish Healing Center.

Mrs. Hope was a member of the executive board of the Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation and volunteered for several other cancer organizations.

Mrs. Hope’s cancer support book, “Help Me Live: 20 Things People With Cancer Want You to Know,” published in 2005 (with a revised and expanded second edition released in 2011), was featured extensively in various media, including “The Today Show,” Time magazine, The Wall Street Journal, ABC News’ “Nightline” and the Hallmark Channel, and was once a guest on the “Oprah Winfrey Show.” Her blog appeared on the Huffington Post website.

A former newspaper editor and award-winning journalist who developed hundreds of medical news reports and documentaries for TV, her many honors include two Emmy Awards and a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award. She was a lung cancer survivor who quit smoking in 1985, 17 years before her diagnosis.

On her blog, where she shared words of wisdom for those living with cancer, Mrs. Hope would sign off with the words of, “Always hope.”

Survivors include her husband of 16 and a half years, David Blake, of Oakland, Calif., and their son, Brett Hardy Blake, of Chicago. She was the was the sister and sister-in-law of Ronald Crasilneck, formerly of St. Louis, and Suzy Crasilneck, both of Eugene, Ore.

A memorial celebration of Lori Hope’s life was held in Oakland, Calif. on her birthday, Oct. 27. Donations in her memory are preferred to The Beverly Fund, www.beverlyfund.org/lorihope.html.