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Biography... |
Cornelia Maude Spelman grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she attended Walnut Hills High School http://www.walnuthillseagles.com. Her family moved to Plymouth, Massachusetts in her junior year, and she attended both the University of Cincinnati and Emerson College in Boston, graduating in 1968. Cornelia earned her MSW at Loyola School of Social Work in Chicago http://luc.edu/socialwork/ and worked as a therapist with children and families before turning full-time to writing. For some of her children's books, Cornelia has won awards from the Oppenheim Toy Portfolio and the Children's Book Committee of Bank Street College of Education. She has also earned several awards from the Illinois Arts Council for her nonfiction writing for adults, and an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, MISSING, was a finalist for the Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award at the Center for Women Writers at Salem College. MISSING will be published in December, 2010 by Northwestern University Press.
Cornelia, a diarist, has taught workshops on diary-writing, and is currently writing volume #134 of her diaries, which are being archived at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, whose mission is to record the lives of ordinary women.
A grandmother of Leo (and two grand-dogs, a Frenchie, Rufus, and a Silky Terrier, Fritz) 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. She most enjoys writing, reading, listening to classical music and jazz, talking and being with friends and family, painting and drawing, and spending time in research libraries. She values those keepsakes passed down to her -her grandfather's worn leather wallet, a mourning bracelet made from a great-aunt's hair, her grandmother's silver spoons-- and likes treasure-hunting at second-hand stores.
