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Biography... |
Cornelia Maude Spelman grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio and Plymouth, Massachusetts, and graduated from Emerson College in Boston (B.S. Speech & Education, 1968) and Loyola School of Social Work (M.S.W., 1987). She worked as a therapist with children and families before turning full-time to writing and to art. For some of her nine children's books (Albert Whitman & Co.), Cornelia has won awards from the Oppenheim Toy Portfolio and the Children's Book Committee of Bank Street College of Education. Her works, described by reviewers as "sensitive" and "compassionate," have been translated into Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Greek, Japanese, German, Arabic, and are forthcoming in Portuguese.
Cornelia's memoir about her mother and the emotional legacies in her family, Missing (Northwestern University Press) has been called "memoir writing at its absolute finest" (Alex Kotlowitz, author, There Are No Children Here). She has earned several awards from the Illinois Arts Council, was a finalist for the Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction award from Salem College, and was awarded the Bernard De Voto Fellowship in Nonfiction at Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.
Cornelia values emotional awareness and management, healthy relationships, and the preservation of personal histories--especially those of women and girls-- through diaries and personal papers. She has been keeping a daily diary for thirty years, and is currently writing Volume 145. Her diaries, along with her mother's, are being archived at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard University (http://www.radcliffe.edu/schlesinger_library.aspx
Hear an interview with Cornelia about the importance of emotion: http://albertwhitman.wordpress.com/2010/10/20/awc-podcast-series-cornelia-maude-spelman/
Grandmother of Leo (and two grand-dogs, a Frenchie, Rufus, and a Silky Terrier, Fritz--see her paintings of them, here) mother of Sam and Kate, mother-in-law of Sarah and Eric, Cornelia lives with her husband, Reginald Gibbons, a writer and professor at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Illinois.
