NOTE: Books available at the WATERBORO PUBLIC LIBRARY will appear in PLUM TELETYPE. Please note that the Waterboro Public Library does not have most of these books!
Caldwell, born in New York, moved to Maine in 1964 and began a 25-year career in 1965 as newspaper columnist for the Portland newspapers, writing about 3,000 columns before retiring in 1991. His home in Damariscotta, called Piper's Bend, was the site of parties for the state's elite, including political leaders, but he also enjoyed the company of artisans, fisherman, and other "regular" people. His 30-foot converted lobster boat, Steer Clear, was recognizable along the Maine coast and he was sometimes stopped for an autograph while cruising.
Caldwell wrote several books and articles about Maine, including: "Harvey F. Gamage: Master Ship Builder, South Bristol, Maine" (April 1970; in "Down East," 15 pp.); Enjoying Maine: Lively Stories About People and Places, from the Sea Coast to the North Country... (1977); Maine Magic: A Vivid Portrayal of Maine Life, Maine Towns and Islands... (1979); Islands of Maine: Where America Really Began (1981); The Islands of Casco Bay (1982); Rivers of Fortune: Where Maine Tides and Money Flowed (1983/2002); Lighthouses of Maine (1986/2002); Maine Coast (1988). Caldwell also wrote the Introduction for the largely pictoral Maine on My Mind (1990).
Before coming to Maine, Caldwell worked for Time-Life and Fawcett Publications, was Asst. Director of Foreign Operations under Pres. Eisenhower, flew bombers in WWII, and lived in Washington DC, New York, London, the Middle East, and Asia, among other places. His alma maters are Cambridge Univ. (Master's degree) and the Sorbonne in Paris.
Caldwell died on 5 January 2001; he lived in Green Valley, Arizona, at the time of his death, with his second wife, Susan Elizabeth Brown, but had been to Portland for a long visit in the summer of 2000. His ashes were scattered in 2001 off the coast of Maine, at his request. Caldwell's memoirs will be released soon.
South Portland resident Ardis Cameron (Ph.D, Boston College, 1986) is Professor of American and New England Studies at the University of Southern Maine. She is a noted labor historian whose expertise includes 19th- and early 20th-century mill town culture and New England women in the labor market. Her publications include Radicals of the Worst Sort: Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860-1912 (1993) and Looking for America: The Visual Production of Nation and People (editor; 2004). She was a contributor to Women's Work and Protest: A Century of Women's Labor History (1985) and A Companion to American Women's History (2005). Her articles and book reviews have been published in academic journals such as American History, American Quarterly, International Labor and Working-Class History, Journal of Women's History, Women's Review of Books, and Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas.
Through Cameron's efforts, Northeastern University Press republished Grace Metalious's 1956 novel Peyton Place, with Cameron's analytical introduction. She continued her research on the ways in which Metalious's book affected American culture with financial support from a 2001 Senior Research Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities and a 2002 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.
Mystery writer Dorothy Cannell was born in Nottingham, England, moved to the U.S. in 1963, lived in Peoria, Illinois, for 37 years, until she and her husband, Julian, moved to Belfast, Maine, in 2005 to be near the ocean. Her cozy mystery series starring Ellie Haskell is well known. The Peoria Journal Star published a profile of Cannell in 2003, along with an extensive Q&A. There's also a June 2007 article about her in the same publication.
Cannell's books in the Ellie Haskell series are:
Other novels include:
She's also published a collection of stories, The Family Jewels and Other Stories (2001).
Carpenter was born in Massachusetts, grew up in Waterville, and teaches literature at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, an institution which he helped to found. After earning his B.A. from Dartmouth (1962) and his Ph.D. in English from the University of Minnesota (1967), he taught at the University of Chicago before coming back to Maine.
Carpenter's poem, "The Yacht," received the 1979 Pablo Neruda award. His books of poetry are The Hours of Morning: Poems from 1976-1979 (1981), Rain (1985), and Speaking Fire at Stones (1992). He's also published two novels, The Keeper of Sheep (1994) and Wooden Nickel (2002; Boston Phoenix review of Wooden Nickel) Details of Carpenter's speaking availabilty and contact info are online.
A resident of Cornish, Maine, poet Tom Carper taught poetry and creative writing for many years at the University of Southern Maine. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The American Scholar, and The Formalist, among others. Books include Fiddle Lane (1991) and From Nature (1995). He's also written a textbook called Meter and Meaning: Sharing the Poetic Experience. Three of Carper's poems and an essay are available on-line.
Born in South Berwick, Carroll grew up and lived most of her life in the house her grandfather built. She went to Berwick Academy and then graduated from Bates College in 1925 (B.A. English; honorary degree in 1945) and married Herbert A. Carroll (Bates '23; died 1983), whose work in psychology took them to Massachusetts, Illinois, New York, and Minnesota, where Gladys Carroll began writing magazine articles and books. She was homesick and eventually the couple returned to Maine, her husband teaching at the Univ. of New Hampshire. The Carrolls had two children, Warren (1932) and Sarah [Watson] (1941).
The Univ. of New Hampshire awarded Carroll an honorary master of arts in 1934, the year her book As the Earth Turns was made into a feature movie. Carroll also received UME's Maryann Hartman Award in 1995. She's featured in Down East Today (1938; Virginia Smith Hall), along with Mary Ellen Chase, Rachel Field, and Robert P. Tristram Coffin.
Her fiction includes her most famous novel, As the Earth Turns (1933/1961/1995; a portrayal of Southern Maine rural life in the 1920s; a 1933 Book of the Month Club Maine Selection; nominated for the Pulitzer Prize), Cockatoo (1929), Land Spell (1930), A Few Foolish Ones (1935; about four Maine families around 1870), Neighbor to the Sky (1937), Head of the Line (1942; short stories), Dunnybrook (1943/1978; fictional history and genealogy of South Berwick), While the Angels Sing (1947), West of the Hill (1949), Christmas without Johnny (1950), One White Star (1954), Sing Out the Glory (1957), Come with Me Home (1960), The Road Grows Strange (1965), The Light Here Kindled (1967, a multigenerational story that starts and ends in an old Maine farmhouse), Christmas Through the Years (1968; short stories), Man on the Mountain (1969; set in the 21st century, in a vast imaginary continent called Great Country, where citizens are strictly segregated according to age), Next of Kin (1974).
Carroll's non-fiction is mostly autobiographical and includes Only Fifty Years Ago (1962), To Remember Forever: The Journal of a College Girl, 1922-1923 (1963), New England Sees it Through, and Mist Through the Mirror (1969; essays), Years Away from Home (1972; about her time in Fall River, Mass.), The Book That Came Alive (1979).
You can read more about Carroll in a 1996 Bates College magazine article. There's a short paragraph of background on Carroll through Univ. of Maine's Women in the Curriculum site.
Rachael Carson -- biologist, environmentalist, nature writer, and crusader -- was born the youngest of three children in Springdale, PA, a small town near Pittsburgh, and she died in Silver Spring, MD. From the mid-1940s, she and her mother spent summers near West Southport, Maine, and in 1952, Carson built a summer cottage along the Sheepscot River here.
Even as a child, Carson was always interested in nature and being outside, and she was also a reader and writer from an early age. In 1918, at the age of 10, she was published in the St. Nicholas Literary Magazine for children, with a story called "A Battle in the Clouds."
Carson attended the Pennsylvania College for Women at Pittsburgh (now Chatham College) on a small scholarship, majoring first in English, then switching to biology. She graduated magna cum laude in 1928. She attended a six-week summer session at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA, at Cape Cod, then went on to study genetics and marine zoology at Johns Hopkins University, where she received her M.A. in 1932 in marine zoology. She taught at Hopkins and at the University of Maryland for a few years, then joined what became the U. S. Fish & Wildlife Service in Washington, D.C., first as a part-time scriptwriter for a science radio show called "Romance Under the Seas." In 1936, she was hired as a junior aquatic biologist.
The Baltimore Sun published a series of her articles on various aspects of the sea -- written to supplement her teaching income -- and her first major publication, an article entitled "Undersea," was published in Atlantic Monthly in Sept. 1937. It had been developed by Carson as an introduction to the print brochures based on the "Romance Under the Seas" shows.
During WWII, Carson's responsibility at Fish & Wildlife was to promote fish as an alternative to foods in short supply because of the war. Between 1943 and 1945, she wrote four pamphlets describing over 70 fish and shellfish. Extremely successful, these booklets served as information sources for newspapers, magazines, and radio broadcasts throughout the country.
Carson served as editor-in-chief of the Fish and Wildlife Service's publications from 1949 to 1952, when she was able -- because of the success of her book The Sea Around Us -- to resign from the Service to devote more time to writing. For her contributions she was awarded the Distinguished Service Award by the Department of the Interior.
Carson's first (and favorite) book, Under the Sea Wind attracted little notice when published in 1941, although it was a Scientific Book Club book-of-the-month selection. But her second book, The Sea Around Us (1951), which she researched while on a Eugene Saxton Fellowship in 1949, was a best-seller for 86 weeks and has been translated into thirty languages. The book, originally serialized as "A Profile of the Sea," received the National Book Award in 1952, among many other awards.
Carson's third book, The Edge of the Sea (1955), firmly established Carson as the most popular scientific writer in the country.
Silent Spring (1962), her fourth book, was first serialised in The New Yorker and immediately drew the wrath of the chemical industry. Carson was accused of being a Communist by Velsicol Chemical Company, which threatened to sue her publisher. The New York Times review of the book, titled "There's Poison All Around Us Now," appeared on September 23, 1962. The controversy around the book -- which warned the public of the hazards of pesticide misuse and abuse -- led to a federal investigation into the misuse of pesticides and resulted in lengthy Congressional hearings in 1963. The Sept. 2002 issue of Smithsonian magazine takes a look back at the book and the movement it began.
A fifth book, The Sense of Wonder, was published posthumously in 1965.
In the early 1950s, Carson became friends with Dorothy Murdoch Freeman (1898-1978) who was an administrator for the Massachusetts Department of Agricultural Services. Carson's Maine home was built near the home of Freeman and her family. The two women exchanged many letters over a twelve-year period, some of which are now published as Always, Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952-1964 (1995; edited by Dorothy Freeman's grand-daughter, Martha Freeman). Bates College has a collection of 543 of these letters, slightly more than half of which were published in the book mentioned above. Maine's Newagen Inn website provides the text of the letter Carson wrote to Freeman on her "last full day in Maine."
Carson died in Spring 1964 of breast cancer that had been diagnosed in 1960. The Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge in Wells, Maine -- a 4,600-acre refuge that stretches from Kittery to Cape Elizabeth -- was dedicated in June 1964 in her memory. The refuge consists primarily of coastal salt marsh with habitat for more than 250 bird and mammal species.
Carson adopted her grandnephew, Roger Christie, on her niece's death in 1957, when Roger was just five years old.
In 1980, Carson was posthumously awarded the highest civilian honor in the U.S., the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
The Yale Library provides a long biographical sketch of Carson as well as details about her papers there. For a list of other resource collections, as well as more biographical material, visit the Rachael Carson Organization website. Carson's obituary from the 4/15/64 New York Times also provides a lot of biographical information. Time magazine, which named Carson one of its Time 100 Scientists and Thinkers, also provides background information on her, especially on Silent Spring. A chronology of Carson's life is also available online. For more on Carson, the environment, and ethics, onlineethics.org presents "Rachel Carson: A Scientist Alerts The Public To The Hazards of Pesticides, " with chapters on her background, the uses of DDT, Carson's decision to write the book, anticipating hostile reaction from the chemical industry, and how she coped with her own health problems and family crises, accompanied by a bibliography and lots of other supporting materials, including a summary of the book and a list of environmental legislation and agencies. The Natural Resources Defense Council provides a history of Silent Spring and links to more information on pesticides and health.
Books about Carson include these for adults: Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature (1997), by Linda Lear, considered the definitive biography; Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1998), edited with introduction by Linda Lear; And No Birds Sing. Rhetorical Analyses of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (2000), ed. Craig Waddell, a collection of new and revised essays examining Carson's language in Silent Spring; and Rachel Carson: The Writer at Work (1972/1998), by Paul Brooks. Books for children include Sounding The Alarm (1989), by Judith Harlan; Rachel Carson: The Wonder of Nature (1992; Earth Keepers series), by Catherine Reef; Rachel Carson: Voice for the Earth (1992), by Ginger Wadsworth.
The National Conservation Training Center is presenting a conference entitled Rachel Carson and the Conservation Movement: Past, Present, and Future in August 2001 in West Virginia.
Born in Woolwich, Isabel Hopestill Carter was the second child of sea captain John Carter and his wife Clarissa (Reed) Carter. Like Joanna and Lincoln Colcord, Isabel and her brothers and sister spent most of their childhood sailing aboard their father's vessels. In 1896 the family came ashore and purchased a home in Bath. Isabel graduated from the then Bath High School in 1904 and then went to Wellesley College where she majored in math and Greek. After graduating in 1908, she earned a teaching certificate from Gorham Normal School, one of the precursors to the University of Southern Maine. With the exception of three years, 1919 to 1921, when she did post-war relief work in Turkey, she was a teacher in both private and public high schools. Most of the time -- 1924 to 1927 and 1938 to 1953 -- she taught math at the Madeira School, McLean, Virginia. Upon retirement, she and her mother returned to the family summer home in Yarmouth. She died in a Yarmouth nursing home in 1976.
Carter's publishing record -- one novel and six short stories -- belies her important role in understanding Maine's 19th-century maritime history. Although her work is fiction, the state's maritime historians recognize the authenticity of her characters and incidents that are based on her parents' experiences at sea. Carter's primary source for her novel, Shipmates (1934), and the six stories published in Atlantic Monthly and Woman's Home Companion between 1926 and 1929 was letters her parents wrote to each other between 1886 and 1896. The collection of over 200 letters is a part of the Maine Maritime Museum (Bath) archives and is available to researchers and writers by appointment.
Children's book writer Mary Cerullo has lived in Maine since 1981 and now lives in South Portland. She considers herself a "science interpreter," and she has worked for the University of Maine Sea Grant Program, interpreting science for the public. She's managing director of programs for Friends of Casco Bay. In addition to her books for children, she's also authored Reading the Environment: Children's Literature in the Science Classroom, a teacher's handbook (1997).
Cerullo's books for children include: Sharks: Challengers of the Deep (1993/1995), Lobsters: Gangsters of the Sea (1994), Coral Reef: A City That Never Sleeps (1996), Octopus: Phantom of the Sea (1997; a Lupine Award honor book), Dolphins: What They Can Teach Us (1998/1999), Ocean Detectives: Solving the Mysteries of the Sea (1999; a Turnstone Ocean Explorer Book), Hop Jump (1999), The Truth About Great White Sharks (2000), Sea Soup: Phytoplankton (1999), Sea Soup: Zooplankton (2001), Life Under Ice (2003; ill. Bill Curtsinger), The Truth About Dangeous Sea Creatures (2003; photos by Jeffrey Rotman; illus. Michael Wertz), and Sea Turtles: Ocean Nomads (2003, photos by Jeffrey Rotman). Jeffrey L. Rotman is the photographer for most of Cerullo's books, although marine photographer Bill Curtsinger of Yarmouth, ME, photographed the Sea Soup books. The teacher's guide for Sea Soup was written by Betsy T. Stevens, a retired science teacher living in Kennebunk.
Romance author and lifetime Mainer Janet Chapman was born in northern Maine and lives now in a log home on a lake in Glenburn, Maine, with her husband and sons. An interview with Chapman is available online at A Romance Reader.
Chapman's books, all set in Maine, include the Highlander Time Travel Romance series: Charming the Highlander (2003), Loving the Highlander (2003), Wedding the Highlander (2003), Tempting the Highlander (2004), and Only With a Highlander (Oct. 2005). Chapman has also written a duo of contemporary romantic suspense novels featuring two sisters who live in fictional Puffin Harbor, on the coast of Maine: The Seductive Imposter (2004), featuring Rachel Foster, and The Dangerous Protector (May 2005), featuring Willow Foster. She plans another contemporary series, also set in Maine.
Born in Blue Hill, a 1909 Univ. of Maine graduate, with a Ph.D. in English from the Univ. of Minnesota, 1922, and honorary degrees from the Univ. of Maine, 1928; Bowdoin, 1933; Colby College, 1937; Northeastern University, 1947; and Smith College, 1949. Mary Ellen Chase spent most of her adult life away from Maine but wrote of it with passion. Chase was a professor at the Univ. of Minnesota from 1922-1926, then at Smith College from 1926 until she retired in 1955. She wrote novels, autobiographies, historical biographies, and books about writing and literature, as well as other non-fiction works. In 1959 she received the Hale Award, given annually to a distinguished writer with a connexion to New England. One of Chase's students at Smith College, Lee Kingman, herself an author and editor, won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue for a piece entitled "Pamela's Socks and the Roman Emperors," about her teacher, Mary Ellen Chase. Chase is featured in Down East Today (1938; Virginia Smith Hall), along with Rachel Field, Gladys Hasty Carroll, and Robert P. Tristram Coffin. Chase died in a nursing home in Northampton, Mass.
Her works include:
She also wrote the Preface for The Book of Job, from the translation prepared at Cambridge in 1611 for King James I (1946) and for The Book of Ruth, from the translation prepared at Cambridge in 1611 for King James I (1947), and she selected and introduced a volume of Sarah Orne Jewett's stories, The Country of the Pointed Firs, and Other Stories (1968/1981). She also collaborated with the editors of Look magazine in their guidebook New England; A Handbook in Pictures, Maps and Text for the Vacationist, The Traveler... (1947). She selected and edited Readings from the Bible (1952) and edited, with Margaret Eliot Macgregor, The Writing of Informal Essays (1928).
Chase's essay "Memorial Day in Maine" is available on-line. Books about her are A Lantern in the Wind - The Life of Mary Ellen Chase (1887-1973) (by Elienne Squire, Fithian Press, 1995), Feminist Convert: A Portrait of Mary Ellen Chase (Chase, Evelyn Hyman, J. Daniel, 1988), and The White Gate: Adventures in the Imagination of a Child (1954).
Chetkowski is a children's book writer who lives in a farmhouse called Winn Farm in Westminster, Mass., most of the year, and summers on the island of Isleboro in Maine, which is where she does most of her writing. Chetkowski's website provides more information about her, her books, upcoming author events, school visits, etc.
Her first published book, Mabel Takes the Ferry (1995/2001; illus. Dawn Peterson) was based on a true story about her border collie's adventures on and around Penobscot Bay one summer day. Other books include:
Born in Portland, current North Parsonsfield resident Chute is now known as much for her role in the 2nd Maine Militia, an organization dedicated to reducing government's role in our lives, as she is as a novelist. For Chute's article "Bringing Our Government Back Down to Earth,", see this clipping from the Maine Sunday Telegram (August 1995).
Chute has published four novels to date: The Beans of Egypt, Maine (1985/1994/1995), Letourneau's Used Auto Parts (1988/1995), Merry Men (1994/1995; and Snow Man (1999/2001). She has another novel due written but unpublished, The School on Heart's Content Road; she's having trouble getting the 2,600-page work published. She's also written the text for Up River: The Story of A Maine Fishing Community (1996; photos by Olive Pierce) and Elmer Walker: Hermit to Hero (1998; photos by Tonee Harbert).
There's a feature article on Chute at the Salon Website; it's a good source of biographical information about her; be sure to click on "Next Page" for more info. Maine Public TV also provides biographical information on Chute as well as excerpts from her works and a list of her favourite books.
Chute has floated the idea of a write-in run for governor of Maine in 2002, primarily as a way to get her message(s) out and to make people think. Her platform includes "secession from the union, the revocation of constitutional rights for corporations, fewer taxes, a return to smaller communities, freedom to choose lifestyles, universal health care, gun safety classes for kids, free schools, no more lobbyists for big businesses, a society that doesn't need welfare, hemp power and hemp tires."
Robert Maurice Chute was born in Naples, Maine and now makes his home in Poland, Maine. He attended Bridgton High School and Fryeburg Academy, has a B.A. from the University of Maine (1950), and received his Doctor of Science from Johns Hopkins University in 1953. He has taught biology at Middlebury College, San Fernando Valley State College and Lincoln University and is now Bates College Professor Emeritus of Biology, as well as director of the Bates-Morse Mountain Conservation Area, Phippsburg. His area of particular interest is human ecology and culture's impact on lake and coastal ecosystems. His scientific publications include Environmental Insight: Readings and Comment on Human and Nonhuman Nature (1971) and An Introduction to Biology (1976). Chute was also a plumbing inspector and code enforcement officer in Mt. Vernon (ME) from 1976-1979.
Chute is also a poet whose poetry has frequently been published in the Beloit Poetry Journal. He was the fourth recipient of the journal's Chad Walsh Poetry Prize for his poem "Heat Wave in Concord" which was published in the Spring 1996 issue and focuses on Henry D. Thoreau's and a friend's cooling river escape from the heat.
Chute's poetry books, mostly Maine small press publications, include Androscoggin Too: The Pejepscot Poems (1996); Barely Time to Study Jesus: The Nat "Turner" Revolt (1996); Quiet Thunder: Poems from a Bates College Reading (1973); Samuel Sewall Sails for Home: Poetry (Maine Arts Commission 1986 Chapbook Award winner); Thirteen Moons (1982/2000/2002 as three-language edition), which was published in French as Treize Lunes and in Passamaquoddy as 'Sanku Kisuhsok. Other titles are Uncle George: Poems from a Maine Boyhood (1990); Voices Great and Small (1977); When Grandmother Decides to Die (1989); Woodshed on the Moon: Thoreau Poems (1991), and Essays in All Directions (2007, poems). Chute also edited Gunner's Moon (1996), a collection of poems by Roy Zarucchi.
According to a Bates College news release, one of Chute's current works in progress is "Sweeping the Skys," a poetry collection about World War II Russian female combat pilots. In 1996 the poem won second prize for the annual William and Kingman Page Chapbook Award granted by Potato Eyes Foundation, Troy, Maine. Chute has written using the pseudonym L. W. Pond.
Details of Chute's speaking availability and contact info are online.
Born in New Providence, Iowa, and raised on a 125-acre farm, poet Amy Clampitt, considered one of the most distinguished 20th-century American poets, was a long-time Corea, Maine, summer visitor. A number of her poems contain subjects and images influenced by the area's natural beauty. Another Maine writer, Louise Dickinson Rich, also wrote about the Corea area in her book Peninsula.
Clampitt earned a B.A. at Grinnell College (with honors, 1941) and also studied at Columbia University and the New School for Social Research. She worked at Oxford University Press from 1943 to 1951 as secretary and writer, as reference librarian at the National Audubon Society (1952 to 1959), and as a freelance writer, editor, and researcher during the 1960s and 1970s, then spent five years (1977 to 1982) as an editor at E. P. Dutton.
She first attempted to write novels and then turned to poetry in the 1960s. Her work was self-published and appeared in a limited edition chapbook titled Multitudes, Multitudes (1974). Four years later (1978) her work appeared for the first time in the New Yorker. It was the publication of The Kingfisher (1983), considered by many to be her best collection, which brought her to the attention of literary and academic scholars and critics. The first section, "Fire and Water," contains six poems with Maine themes and images. That same year Clampitt published The Summer Solstice, four poems which she wrote while vacationing in Corea. Only 33 accordion-folded copies were issued.
The poet's other books are
The New York Times review of her Collected Poems provides insight into her writing, with examples; links to reviews of her other books; and a link to Clampitt's NYT obituary, which described her poetry as "dense, ornate and allusive poetry."
In addition to being a noted poet, Clampitt was also a well-respected teacher. She was a College of William and Mary writer in residence, Amherst College visiting writer and also a visiting writer at Smith College.
Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, and she was a MacArthur Prize Fellow in 1992.
The Academy of American Poets provides a brief Clampitt biography and links to 12 of her poems. Three other Clampitt poems are located on the Readings in Contemporary Poetry site. Other online Clampitt information sources are "In the Subtropics with Amy Clampitt", a memoir of Clampitt as teacher by poet Katherine Jackson and "Clampitt and Rich as Public Historians in the 1990s," an academic paper presented by Charles Vandersee at a Rutgers University conference.
Clampitt died at her home in Lenox, Massachusetts, in 1994. Her brother Lawrence lived in Brunswick, Maine, at the time of her death.
Mystery and thriller writer Joanne Clarey grew up in Massachusetts, graduated from Colby College with a B.A. in English Literature (1962), earned her M.Ed. and Ed.D. in clinical counseling and supervision from the University of Maine at Orono, resided in Portland for many years, and lives now in Maine and New Hampshire in the summer. She lives in High Point, North Carolina, in the winter. Before she began writing for publication, she taught high school English, ran an antiques business, taught counseling and women's studies at the University of Southern Maine, and was a psychotherapist in private practice. Her webpage includes biographical info and more details about her books.
Her mysteries are set in the mountains of New Hampshire; they're The Mysteries of Hummingbird Falls (2005) and Riddled to Death (2006), in the Mysteries of Hummingbird Falls series, featuring a retired English teacher who investigates murders. Her books in the Dr. Christie McMorrow thriller series are set in Cumberland County, Maine, and star forensic psychologist Christie McMorrow and detective Bill Drummond; they're Twisted Truth (2005) and Skinned (2007), based on her research into the child trafficking trade.
Carman Clark, born in Old Forge, N.Y., lived on a poultry farm in Union, Maine, from 1949 until her death. She was a regular columnist and the gardening editor for the Camden Herald; she wrote the paper's From the Orange Mailbox column for over 20 years, compiling selections from the column for a book titled From the Orange Mailbox: Notes from a Few Country Acres (1985). She published a mystery novel in 2001, The Maine Mulch Murder, in which a woman discovers the body of a young man who had come to rural Granton, Maine, to locate his birth parents. A sequel, The Corpse In The Compost, was planned. Clark's first career was as a school teacher specializing in language arts at Thomaston Junior High School. She was the mother of mystery novelist Kate Flora, who interviewed Clark in the Spring 2001 issue of Mystery Readers Journal (not online), and librarian John Clark. She died in Nov. of 2005.
Born in Caratunk, Maine, Bill Clark was a columnist for the Portland Press Herald. Many of his columns and books focused on the fictional town of Cedar River and its inhabitants. His books include Tales of Cedar River (1960), More Tales of Cedar River (1961), Maine Is In My Heart (1964), From Thought to Theme (1965), The Best of Bill Clark: 1957-1967 (1967), Sing Peace to Cedar River (1982), The Hills of Maine and Other Stories (1990). He also published a Maine humor collection, Down East Humor (1973).
Rebecca Clarke, considered American's first writer for children because of the way she wrote for children and not for small adults, was born in Norridgewock and lived there most of her life, except for a 10-year period from 1851-1861 when she was a school teacher in Indiana. She also wintered in Baltimore, Florida, and California. Clarke's first story was sold to the Memphis Daily Appeal, written under the pseudonym "Sophie May," and subsequent stories were sold to Little Pilgrim, Boston Congregationalist, and Merry's Museum. Deidre Johnson's 19th-Century Girls' Series Web site has a fairly detailed biography (with reference citations) of Clarke and her sister with whom she lived in Norridgewock, Sarah J. Clarke (also a writer, aka "Penn Shirley"), and the same site offers online book covers and series listings for most of Clarke's books. Kevin Greene's Sophie May Page contains a detailed biography, a bibliography, and detailed summaries of the various series. Encyclopedia Britannica online also has background on Clarke, and Jeff Hollingsworth's Magnificent Mainers (1995) includes a short section on Clarke. Clarke purchased and donated the building for the first Norridgewock public library shortly before her death.
Clarke wrote 45 books from 1861 to 1903, of which 37 were series books. At least two of her books were for adults but were not very successful: Drone's Honey (1887) and Pauline Wyman (1897). Her children's books (written under the pen name Sophie May) include:
: Little Prudy (1864), Sister Susy (1864), Captain Horace (1864), Cousin Grace (1865), Fairy Book (1865), Dotty Dimple (1868).
: Dotty Dimple at Her Grandmother's (1868), Dotty Dimple Out West (1868), Dotty Dimple at Home (1868), Dotty Dimple at Play (1869), Dotty Dimple at School (1869), Dotty Dimple Flyaway (1869).
: Little Folks Astray (1870), Prudy Keeping House (1870), Aunt Madge's Story (1871), Little Grandmother (1872), Little Grandfather (1873), Miss Thistledown (1873).
: Flaxie Frizzle (1876), Doctor Papa (1877), Little Pitchers (1878), Twin Cousins (1880), Flaxie's Kittyleen (1883; also called simply Kittyleen), Flaxie Growing Up (1884).
: Wee Lucy (1894), Jimmy Boy (1895), Kyzie Dunlee (1895), Wee Lucy's Secret (1899), Jimmy, Lucy, and All (1900), Lucy in Fairyland (1901).
: Doctor's Daughter (1871), Our Helen (1874), Asbury Twins (1875), Quinnebasset Girls (1877), Janet (1882), In Old Quinnebasset (1891), Joy Bells (1903).
(for Children?): The Campion Diamonds (1897)
Harold Clifford was born in Winthrop and received his B.A. from Bates College. He was principal of Alfred High School from 1912-13 and 1916-17 and Superintendent of schools, including those in the Boothbay area, from 1917 to 1956. The community playground in Boothbay is named for Clifford, as is the Boothbay Region High School's annual book award. Clifford wrote the history of the Boothbay Harbor Rotary Club from its inception in the 1930s to 1987, with Chip Griffin completing the history to 1999; the history is dedicated to Clifford in appreciation "of the vibrant tone of both his piano playing and his words."
Clifford wrote history books for adults and children about Maine and New England. Books for adults include: Maine and Her People (1958/1963/1968/1976); Boothbay Region 1906 to 1960 (1961); You and Your Job in Maine (1964); and Charlie York: Maine Coast Fisherman (1974), available as a book on tape. Juvenile books include: America, My Home Then and Now (1939/1944/1948/1953); Canada, My Neighbor (1944); Yesterday in America (1949/1953); American Leaders (1953); Exploring New England (1961); Sea Horse: A Shetland Pony Comes to Monhegan (1987); and Clear Sailing (1987). He also wrote My Home State of Maine (date and audience unknown).
Coatsworth, born in Buffalo, NY, and a graduate of Vassar (BA 1915) and Columbia (MA 1916), was the wife of Henry Beston (married 1929) and lived with him in Hingham, Mass., and then on a farm in Nobleboro for decades; she's buried in the cemetery on Chimney Farm. Their daughter Kate Barnes was Maine's first poet laureate. Coatsworth travelled widely, spending time in England, France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Egypt, Morocco, Japan, China, Mexico, the Philippines, and the Yucatan. She incorporates her travel memories into her writing.
Coatsworth wrote over 90 books, most of them children's books, including:
Coatsworth won the 1931 Newbery Award for her children's book, The Cat Who Went To Heaven (1930; set in Japan).
Her first novel, Here I Stay: A Maine Novel, was written in 1938. Her Maine Memories: Vignettes of Life around Damariscotta (1944) was the first of several autobiographical books, including Personal Geography: Almost an Autobiography (1976). Maine Ways (1945) contains stories and anecdotes of the Maine way of life. Books of poems include Country Poems (1942) and Summer Green (1948).
Books of poems include her first book, Fox Footprints (1923), Atlas and Beyond (1924), Compass Rose (1929), Country Poems (1942), and Summer Green (1948). Her childrens poems are also included in Sung under the Silver Umbrella: Poems for Young Children (1935), which also includes poems by Rachel Field, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Laura E. Howe Richards. The de Grummond Children's Literature Collection at the University of Southern Mississippi has a short autobiography, photos, letters, and some material pertaining to Coatsworth's writing, as well a good and concise biographical sketch of her life and work.
Born in Brunswick, a 1915 graduate of Bowdoin, and later a professor there (1934-1955), essayist, poet, and novelist Coffin won the 1936 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Strange Holiness. The Bowdoin Special Collections Library gives detailed information about the almost 50 linear feet of manuscripts, drafts, proofs, notes, personal records, lectures, plays, poems, books, recordings, and photographs that it holds.
Two biographical pages are found on the Bowdoin Special Collections page on Coffin and from A Princeton Companion - entry for Coffin (which records an incorrect date for the Pulitzer). Coffin is also featured in Down East Today (1938; Virginia Smith Hall), along with Mary Ellen Chase, Gladys Hasty Carroll, and Rachel Field.
Coffin's works include:
: Christchurch (1924), Dew & Bronze (1927), Golden Falcon (1929), The Yoke of Thunder (1932), Ballads of Square-Toed Americans (1933), Strange Holiness (1935; won Pulitzer), Fifteen Girls on a Hobby Horse (1937; collection of short stories and poems), Saltwater Farm (1937), Maine Ballads (1938), There Will Be Bread and Love (1942), Primer for America (1943), Poem for a Son with Wings (1945), Apples By Ocean (1945/1950), People Behave Like Ballads (1946), Collected Poems (1948), One-Horse Farm: Down East Georgics (1949), The Third Hunger and the Poem Aloud (1949), Poems That Write the Poet (1953; poetic text of a lecture at Haverford College, given 1898), Hellas Revisted (1954; a collection by Coffin's friends), Selected Poems (1955).
: Book of Crowns and Cottages (1925), An Attic Room (1929), New Poetry of New England: Frost & Robinson (1938; lectures), The Substance That Is Poetry (1942), Book of Uncles (1944), Maine Doings: Informal Essays (1950), On the Green Carpet (1951), Mainstays of Maine (1944/1978; cookery), Maine Cooking: Old-Time Secrets (1991?, essays on food; maybe a republication of Mainstays?).
: Red Sky in the Morning (1935), John Dawn (1936), and Thomas, Thomas -- Ancil Thomas (1941).
A Book of Seventeenth-Century Prose (1929; co-edited), Laud: Storm Center of Stuart England (1930), The Dukes of Buckingham (1931), Lost Paradise: A Boyhood on a Maine Coast Farm (1934; based on recollections of childhood spent on Pond Island), Portrait of an American (1935; about his father), Kennebec: Cradle of Americans (1937/1965/2002), Captain Abby and Captain John (1939/2002; about The Pennells of Brunswick), Yankee Coast (1947), Christmas in Maine (1948), Do You Know Maine? (1948), Coast Calendar (1949), Life in America: New England (1951).
Bill Cohen was born in Bangor, the son of a Jewish father, a baker, and an Irish Protestant mother. He received an A.B. in Latin from Bowdoin College in 1962 and an LL.B cum laude from Boston University Law School in 1965. Cohen was a star basketball player in both high school and college.
Following his formal education, Cohen became an attorney with a Bangor law firm and Assistant County Attorney for Penobscot County from 1968-1970. He was vice president of the Maine Trial Lawyers Association from 1970-1972, entering public life as a city councilor in Bangor (1969-1972), also serving as Bangor's mayor from 1971-1972. He served as a Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1972-1978, then was elected to the U.S. Senate, where he served until he announced his retirement after 3 terms in early 1996. Democratic President Clinton appointed Cohen as his Secretary of Defense in 1997, a position he held until 2001.
Cohen married Janet Langhart Cohen on Valentine's Day 1996; she was a former runway model and a seasoned television journalist who worked as a Boston newscaster and as correspondent for Entertainment Tonight and Black Entertainment Television.
Cohen has written poetry, suspense, and non-fiction. Titles include:
The University of Maine has a collection of Cohen's papers and more information about him. You can hear him giving a speech at the National Press Club (Jan. 2001) on NPR's website.
Like her younger brother Lincoln, Joanna "Nan" Colcord was born at sea aboard her father's ship, Charlotte A. Littlefield. Sharing similar experiences with other children in 19th century maritime families, Nan and Lincoln spent much of their childhood and adolescence at sea. A University of Maine graduate, Joanna Colcord earned an undergraduate degree in chemistry (1909) and a masters in biological chemistry (1909). She then made a major career change and studied at the New York School of Philanthropy and became a social worker. After successful administrative careers in New York and Minnesota, she became a department director for the Russell Sage Foundation from 1929 to 1944 when she retired for health reasons. She was nationally known as a scholar, administrator, and writer who published numerous articles in professional journals.
Among her social welfare books are Broken Homes: A Study of Family Desertion and Its Social Treatment (1919); The Long View; Papers and Addresses by Mary E. Richmond (1930; Joanna Colcord selected, edited, wrote biographical notes); Community Planning in Unemployment Emergencies: Recommendations Growing Out of Experience (compiled by Joanna Colcord; 1930); Setting up a Program of Work Relief (1931); Emergency Work Relief, As Carried Out in Twenty-Six American Communities, 1930-1931 (1932); Community Programs for Subsistence Gardens (1933; with Mary Johnston); and Cash Relief (1936). During the Depression she was a strong advocate for some type of social security and health insurance.
Nan Colcord, like her brother, never forgot family stories and her own experiences at sea. She wrote two books -- Roll and Go: Songs of American Sailormen (1924; introduction by Lincoln Colcord) and Songs of American Sailormen (1938; introduction by Lincoln Colcord) -- examples of sea chanties. Her third sea book is Sea Language Comes Ashore (1945), a dictionary of words and phrases whose origins are found in the sailing world. An excerpt from Colcord's article "Domestic Life on American Sailing Ships" (American Neptune, July 1942) is reprinted on Maine Public TV's Home: The Story of Maine page. A book on both Joanna and Lincoln Colcord was published in 1999, entitled Letters from Sea, 1882-1901: Joanna and Lincoln Colcord's Seafaring Childhood (by Parker Bishop Albee).
Though technically born on a ship that was rounding Cape Horn on its way to China, Colcord's home was Searsport, Maine. He came from five generations of sea-faring men and it's not surprising that he wrote about the sea. Colcord graduated from Univ. of Maine in 1905 and was a Washington correspondent for the "Philadelphia Ledger" around the time of the first World War.
Colcord's most famous work was "Vision of War," a 150-page poem published in 1915. Other works include The Drifting Diamond (1912), The Game of Life and Death: Stories of the Sea (1914), and An Instrument of the Gods, and other stories of the sea (1922/1972). Some of his stories are collected in Sea Stories from Searsport to Singapore: Selections of Lincoln Colcord (1987).
Colcord also translated O.E. Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth, a Saga of the Prairies (1927), provided the record of vessels for G.S. Watson's Sailing Days on the Penobscot... (1932), wrote the appendix for John McConaughy's Who Rules America: A Century of Invisible Government (1934), wrote the introduction to his sister Joanna Colcord's Roll and Go (1924) and Songs of American Sailormen (1938), and provided notes for Master Mariner of Maine - Reminiscences of Charles Everett Ranlett 1816-1917 (1942).
A book on both Joanna and Lincoln Colcord was published in 1999, entitled Letters from Sea, 1882-1901: Joanna and Lincoln Colcord's Seafaring Childhood (by Parker Bishop Albee).
Cole grew up on Long Island (NY), served with the Army Air Corps during World War II (flying 35 combat missions over Europe), graduated from Yale University (1945), and worked in Manhattan before moving to Maine in the 1950s, where he lived the rest of his life, apart from a 6-year interlude in Key West. Cole died in Brunswick, Maine, on 8 January 2003 at the age of 79.
Cole was well known in Maine, both for his career in journalism and his positions on political and environmental issues. He was the founding editor, with Peter Cox, of the Maine Times in 1968, and was editor of Maine In Print, the newspaper of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. He also edited the Kennebunk Star and the Brunwick Times-Record, for which he wrote a regular column. Besides writing a number of books, he published essays and articles widely, including in Atlantic Monthly, Field & Stream, Country Journal, Harper's, Esquire, Portland magazine, and Maine Biz. He also taught journalism classes at Bowdoin.
Books include:
Cole also wrote the introduction to Salmon (1984) and the foreword to Brad Burns' LL Bean Fly-Fishing for Striped Bass Handbook (1998).
Some of Cole's awards include the Distinguished Flying Cross for military service, and the Yankee Quill Award from the Academy of New England Journalists, the Associated Press Award for Best Political Reporting, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Natural Resources Council of Maine, and the Outdoor Life Award for Environmental Writing, presented by President Jimmy Carter.
Calvin Trillin wrote a short piece on Cole for Time magazine (September 16, 1996).
Eliot Coleman grew up in Redbank, New Jersey, and has lived in Colorado, Massachusetts, and Vermont. In 1968, after reading their book The Good Life, Coleman bought 60 acres of Helen and Scott Nearing's land in Harborside, Cape Rosier, near Brooksville, Maine, for $1,980. He sold 20 acres for the same $33/acre he paid for it. Coleman made his living for the next two decades working on other organic farms, including, in the late 1970s, the experimental Coolidge Center in Massachusetts, where Coleman developed the idea of using cold frames inside hoop houses to extend the growing season, and in the early 1980s at the Mountain School in Vermont, where he directed the farm program. He also traveled in Europe in the mid-1970s when he was working on his graduate degree in Spanish literature, and while there toured organic farms. In the early 1990s he bought the land at Harborside back from his ex-wife, and he and his third wife Barbara Damrosch have lived there since, earning much of their livelihood by selling the organic produce they raise from October-May each year at Four Season Farm. Coleman is known as an innovator in farming systems and tools.
Coleman's publications include The New Organic Grower: A Master Manual of Tools and Techniques for the Home and Market Gardener (1989/1995; Amazon reviews of New Organic Grower); The New Organic Gardener's Four Season Harvest: How To Harvest Fresh Organic Vegetables From Your Home Garden All Year Long (1992; forward by Barbara Damrosch; republished in 1999 as Four Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long); The Winter Harvest Manual: Farming the Backside of the Calendar (1999; with Barbara Damrosch), a technical manual for building and using cold frames, hoop houses, and other tools and techniques to grow greens and other produce year-round in cold climates. He also wrote the forward to Keeping Food Fresh: Old World Techniques and Recipes (1999), by the gardeners and farmers of Terre Vivant.
Coleman has been keynote speaker at the Northeast Organic Farming Association Summer Conference at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., and at the 2004 Summer Conference is giving a pre-conference intensive workshop. (Others at the conference include Ralph Nader, Congressman Ron Paul, and keynote speaker Dr. Vandana Shiva.) Coleman and Damrosch hosted The Learning Channel show "Gardening Naturally" in the 1990s; their videos are still available. An article on Coleman and Damrosch that appeared in People, Places, Plants magazine in Spring 1997 is available on-line, as well as another article from the same magazine, titled 'The Contrary Garden,' about 4-season gardening. Also on-line is a Mother Earth News article by Coleman about winter harvesting. Coleman and Damrosch were featured in the Sept/Oct. 1998 issue of Hope magazine. The couple also answered gardening questions in American Homestyle and Gardening magazine for several years, and they both give numerous gardening talks. They were keynote speakers for the 19th Guelph Organic Conference held in Canada in January 2000.
Well-known cryptozoologist Loren Coleman was raised in Decatur, Illinois, and received his undergraduate degree in anthropology-zoology and his graduate degree in psychiatric social work. He settled in New England in 1975, bought a cabin in Rangeley in 1980, and moved to Portland in 1983, where he's lived since, and where he plans to open a Rare Animals and Cryptozoology Museum in the future. Coleman has been visiting assistant professor of social work at the University of New England, and, was for thirteen years, a senior research associate at the Edmund S. Muskie School of Public Policy, University of Southern Maine; he's recently retired after being an adjunct associate professor at the University of Southern Maine from 1989-2003. His two sons, Malcolm and Caleb, are both native Mainers. Articles and interviews concerning Coleman are available on his website.
Coleman's first article -- "Mystery Animals in Illinois" -- was published when he was 21, in March 1969. Since then, he's written over 200 articles, been a consultant to a number of reality-based TV shows, including "Unsolved Mysteries" and The History Channel's "In Search of History," and he writes a regular cryptozoology column for Fate Magazine, as well as frequent articles for the London-based Fortean Times, Mysteries Magazine, and The Anomalist. He's also a frequent guest on radio shows, to discuss both his cryptozoology books and his books on human behavior contagion and suicide clusters. Coleman speaks to children's groups, libraries, and other civic groups worldwide. On his other (collaborative) website, Cryptomundo, Coleman lists the top 10 Cryptozoology stories of 2006.
Though best known for his books and articles on cryptozoology, Coleman has written or edited several books on suicide prevention and copycats, including The Copycat Effect: How the Media and Popular Culture Trigger the Mayhem in Tomorrow's Headlines (2004). His work on the suicides of baseball players was heavily covered in the media, including in Sports Illustrated and on ESPN. Coleman has also developed several curricula on the topic, including the videos SOS: Runaways & Teen Suicides: Coded Cries for Help (1987), Preventing Tragedies (1999), and A Life Saved (2002). He was director of the Runaway Suicide Prevention Project at USM, and has been involved with the Maine Governor's Youth Suicide Prevention Initiative, having trained some 1,000 Mainers since 1998.
Coleman's other works include:
Some of Coleman's articles from Fate magazine are available online, including a May 1999 article titled "Eastern Bigfoot-Of Momo and the Marked Hominids," and an excerpt from a May 2001 article, "The Myakka Skunk Ape Photographs." His cryptozoological predictions for the years 2001-2010 are online from Fortean Times.
Born in Prospect Harbor, Miriam Colwell lived with her maternal grandparents as her mother died when Miriam was a toddler and her father was ill with tuberculosis. She graduated from Winter Harbor High School and then attended the University of Maine, Orono, majoring in English. She left before graduating to live in New York where she was a freelance and advertising copywriter. She returned to Prospect Harbor in 1940 and became the town's postmaster; her grandfather had held the position but had been forced to leave when he reached the mandatory retirement age. Colwell was 23 and the youngest postmaster in the United States.
Colwell's first novel, Wind off the Water (1945), is a realistic view of a coastal Maine village. Two years later she published Day of the Trumpet (1947), which is based on her ancestors' experience as one of the first Maine lobster families. Her third novel, Young (1955, republished 1998), depicts 24 hours in the lives of two young women who have just graduated from high school. Although Colwell sold the rights to a movie company, the movie was never produced. Her fourth novel, Contentment Cove, whose 1950s plot revolves around the intertwined lives of three women in a Maine coastal town, was written in the 1950s but not published until 2006.
Colwell was the long-time friend/companion of artist and writer Chenoweth Hall (1908-1999) and attributes Hall with having the most influence on her writing.
An extensive June 2005 interview with Miriam Colwell is located on the Smithsonian Archives of American Art website.
David Compton was born in New York and raised in the midwest, moving to Rhode Island in 1954. He and his wife lived from his retirement until the end of his life in a log home in Buckfield, Maine. Compton received a bachelor's degree from Bates in French (1963) and a master's degree from Brown in French literature. For more than 30 years, he taught French and English at private schools in New England. His novels include: A Filthy Business (2002), a military thriller, based partially on the three years he served in Army intelligence; Nexus (2004), a time-travel fantasy; Catalyst (2006), a sequel to Nexus; and Claxton Hall (2005), historical fiction about a New England private school.
Known for his scholarship on New England history and culture, University of Southern Maine professor Joe Conforti is frequently contacted by Boston and Maine newspapers for his comments on topics as varied as pilgrims and Connecticut’s identity. A native of Fall River, Massachusetts, Conforti earned an M.A. (1972) and Ph.D. (1975) at Brown University and was the founder and ten-year director of the University of Southern Maine's American and New England Studies graduate program.
His publications include: Saints and Strangers: New England in British North America (2006); Creating Portland: History and Place in Northern New England (editor, 2005); Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-Twentieth Century (2001), which received the 2002 Northeast Popular Culture/American Culture Association Book Award; Jonathan Edwards, Religious Tradition and American Culture (1995). His Ph.D. dissertation was published as Samuel Hopkins and the New Divinity Movement: Calvinism, the Congregational Ministry and Reform between the Great Awakenings in 1981. His first monograph was A History of East Providence, Rhode Island (1976).
Philip Conkling, a Rockport resident since 1984, is the co-founder, with Peter Ralston, and executive director of the Island Institute, Rockland. The Institute's purpose is to protect and promote a balanced use of Maine's islands. Conkling is also the editor of the Institute's yearly publication, Island Journal, which is noted for its insightful articles and its photography and illustrations.
Before establishing the Institute, Conkling was a forester and co-authored a number of research reports for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service. The reports include Recovery of a Bryophyte Community on Hurricane Island, Maine (1984) and The Response of Plant Species to Low-Level Trampling Stress on Hurricane Island, Maine (1985). He also researched and prepared reports on a number of related issues for the State of Maine. The reports include Old Growth White Pine (Pinus strobus L.) Stands in Maine and Their Relevance to the Critical Areas Program (1978) and A Management Plan for the Unregistered Coastal Islands of Maine (1979). His island interest is also seen in Green Islands, Green Sea: a Guide to Foraging on the Islands of Maine, published by Hurricane Island Outward Bound School in 1980.
His most widely known book is Islands in Time: a Natural and Human History of the Islands of Maine, originally published in 1981 with a paperback second edition issued in 1999. He also wrote People and Islands: Resource Management Issues for Islands in the Gulf of Maine (1984), edited From Cape Cod to the Bay of Fundy: an Environmental Atlas of the Gulf of Maine (1995), and wrote introductions for Hurricane Island: The Town That Disappeared (1989) and Cod and Haddock Spawning Grounds in the Gulf of Maine: From Grand Manan Channel to Ipswich (1997). He collaborated with Anne Hayden on Lobsters Great and Small: How Scientists and Fishermen are Changing Our Understanding of a Maine Icon (2002) and with David Platt as co-editor of Holding Ground (2004), a compilation of the best writing from Island Journal, 1984 -2004.
His publication jamien.com (2000) is a personal rather than environmental book and is an extension of the web site he and his family created when his wife Jamien was dying from cancer in 1999.
Connellan was born near Portland, grew up in Rockland, and lived at the time of his death in Sprague, Connecticut (with wife Nancy and daughter), working as a poet-in-resident at Connecticut State University from 1987-2001 and acting as Connecticut poet laureate from 1996-2001. He considered himself an "everyman," a working man, and his poetry concerns itself with the human condition. The content of much of his poetry is also highly influenced by his early proximity to the fishing and lobstering industry in Maine.
Connellan received an honorary doctorate from the University of Maine in Augusta in 1998; he attended the University of Maine for three years in his youth before joining the Army for 18 months. During the 1950s, he lived in Greenwich Village and was part of the Beat Generation of poets. After he moved with his wife to Clinton, Connecticut, Connellan worked as a typewriter ribbon salesman for many years, writing poetry before the sales job. When he won the Shelley Memorial Award for Poetry in 1983, he gained enough recognition for his writing that he was able to work as a teacher in the Connecticut schools. He was also nominated three times for a Pulitzer Prize.
A fairly lengthy analysis of many of Connellan's poems, with specific reference to his moral vision, is available through Writers Online. A memorial piece on Connellan appears at Poetry Bay, and biographical info, a photo, and a poem are available at MainePoetry.
Works include:
A Texas native, raised in Kentucky, Joe Coomer still lives in Texas most of the year but summers in a house on the river in Eliot, ME, and sails along the Maine coast. His wife Heather is a Connecticut native, but her family were some of the original settlers of Eliot. Coomer attended the University of Kentucky and graduated from Southern Methodist University in 1982. He taught creative writing in New Mexico after graduating from college.
Coomer's first work of fiction was published in 1983, The Decatur Road: A Novel of the Appalachian Country. Other works include:
Cooney was born in Brooklyn, summered as a child on the Maine coast, received her art degree from Smith College (BA 1938), and lived until her death in March 2000 in Damariscotta with her husband, Charles Talbot Porter, a retired doctor; their four children are grown. She wrote and illustrated over 100 children's books. Cooney won two Caldecott Medals, received the University of Maine's Maryann Hartman Award in 1998, and was recognised by Gov. Angus King as a "Maine State Treasure." Cooney illustrated over 105 children's books, 18 of which she also authored.
Children's books include:
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You can read more about her through Denise Ortakale's Cooney site and on Carol Hurst's Children's Literature site. There's also an article by Cooney about making picture books (1998) at Horn Book, her remarks at Bowdoin's commencement in 1996, and a little background material on Cooney at Univ. of Maine's site. Her papers are collected at deGrummond at the Univ. of Southern Mississippi.
Born in Clinton, Massachusetts, Ellen Cooney received her M.A. in English from Clark University in 1978. She now lives in Phippsburg, Maine and Cambridge, Massachusetts. A short story writer and novelist, her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Glimmer Train, Ontario Review, Literary Review (see "A Father's Heart"), Story, and other literary magazines. Her work has also been included in the annual Best American Short Stories series. Cooney has taught writing at MIT, Harvard, Radcliffe, Boston College, Northeastern, and the University of Maine.
Her first published novel was Small Town Girl (1983) about a young Catholic girl growing up in the 1960s. Next was All The Way Home (1984), about women softball players. A dance teacher's creativity is revitalized in The Old Ballerina (1999). Tara and Guida find adventure and love in The White Palazzo (2002). Gun Ball Hill (2004), the first of three historical novels, takes place in Maine at the time of the Revolution. The second, A Private Hotel for Gentle Ladies (2005) is set in 1900 Boston.
Stephen Costanza, author and illustrator of children's books, lives in Belfast, Maine. He spent some of his youth in Cherry Hill, New Jersey (he returned to an elementary school there to share with the kids his passion for the arts), studied music theory and composition at Syracuse University, and is a University of the Arts (Philadelphia) alumnus who is also a musician. Some of his other jobs have included graphic artist, ragtime and classical pianist, and designer of merchandise for sports teams. A photo and a bit more information is available at the Courier Publications website.
Costanza is the illustrator of Noodle Man: The Pasta Superhero (2002), written by April Pulley Sayre, featuring Al Dente, who wants to do anything except work in the family pasta deli business; and Just Because/Shane's Best Week Ever! (2004), a book containing two short stories about foster families by Jan Riddle, part of the Kits for Kids series, based in Camden, Maine. Costanza also wrote and illustrated Mozart Finds a Melody (2004), a fictionalized tale of how Mozart wrote his "Piano Concerto no. 17 in G Major" with inspiration from a pet starling. His artwork has appeared in magazines, newspapers, advertising and text books. He was invited to exhibit illustrations at the Bologna Children's Book Fair in Italy in 2000, and his work has also been exhibited at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland. Costanza is active in the arts community in the midcoast Maine area.
Côté Robbins was raised in Waterville, Maine, attended the Univ. of Maine -- first as an Art major at the Presque Isle campus, then on a bilingual education scholarship, and finally to complete her M.A. in Liberal Studies -- and lives now in Brewer with her husband David.
Côté Robbins was raised speaking French and English at home and has spent her adult life studying her Franco-American roots. After teaching high school briefly, she worked as editor of an international, bilingual socio-cultural journal called Le FORUM (formerly Le F.A.R.O.G.) at the Franco-American Center from 1986-1996. She is the founder and director of the Franco-American Women's Institute, and she teaches courses at the Univ. of Maine in Franco-American women's experiences. For more about Côté Robbins, visit her Web site, or read an interview with Côté Robbins on Amazon.
A 1997 winner of the Maine Chapbook Award for her creative non-fiction Wednesday's Child (1997/1999; Wednesday's Child reviewed on Amazon), Côté Robbins is working on a book of literary criticism on Peyton Place author Grace de Repentigny Metalious.
Other publications include I Am Franco-American and Proud of It: An Anthology of Writings of Franco-American Women (1995; designer and co-editor); two bibliographies, Women and Class and Franco-American Health-Related Bibliography (1987/1989); an electronic magazine for Franco-American women, moé pi toé (editor; previously called The Initiative); Canuck and Other Stories by Camille Lessard Bissonette (editor, 2006); and numerous essays, poems, and book reviews in over 20 journals, newspapers, and anthologies. Besides the book on Grace Metalious, Côté Robbins is also editing a book of translations of early 20th-century Franco-American women writers.
A native of Augusta, Maine, Corrigan received his B.A. in English from State University of New York at Fredonia and his M.F.A. from the University of Texas at El Paso. He has worked as a journalist and freelance writer, and was a literature instructor and the director of the Visiting Writer Series at the Maine School of Science and Mathematics in Limestone, Maine. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Presque Isle, Maine.
Corrigan has published poems, articles of academic non-fiction, and mysteries. His poems have been published in The River Review/La Revue Riviere; Echoes, Red Owl, The Rio Grande Review, Frost at Midnight, Storyteller, The Advocate, and other literary journals. His non-fiction includes works on dyslexia: "Teaching Dyslexics to Write: A Guide for The Composition Instructor," which appears as a chapter in Richard Graves' Writing, Teaching, Learning: A Sourcebook (1999; aka Rhetoric and Composition, 4th edition) and "A Guide for the Composition Instructor: Teaching Dyslexic Students to Write" in Teaching English in the Two-Year College (Oct. 1997).
His mystery series featuring pro golfer and Maine native Jack Austin includes these titles: Cut Shot (2001), in which Austin helps a rookie who's being blackmailed by a Mafia-run gambling ring; Snap Hook (2004), in which Austin investigates a kidnapping involving the Russian Mafia; Center Cut (2004), with Austin looking into the disappearance of his friend Grant Ashley's new wife; and Bad Lie (2005), in which Austin investigates the violent death of a college student's estranged father; and Out of Bounds (2007). Corrigan also writes a monthly column in Golf Today.
His favourite authors are Robert B. Parker, the creator of Spenser, and poet Philip Levine. There's an online interview with Corrigan as well as his own Jack Austin series website, for more information.
An ex-fighter pilot, a prolific poet, and a Shakespearean scholar, Herb Coursen is originally from New Jersey. He taught poetry at the Choate School and the Univ. of Connecticut before moving to Maine to teach at Bowdoin College in 1964. Retired from Bowdoin in 1991, Coursen lives in Brunswick and teaches now at the University of Maine in Augusta. He's also the academic advisor for Embry-Riddle Aeronautical Insitute in Brunswick. His poem "Feb. 5th 05" is online at Wolf Moon Press Journal.
Coursen's works include:
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Cowan was born in Portland, graduated from Westbrook High School and Bates College (1961), and lives now with her husband in Standish. She has completed basic and advanced courses at the Institute of Children's Literature. Besides publishing over 50 stories and articles in children's magazines such as Highlights, Cobblestone, Faces, Jack and Jill and Children's Digest, she's also published two children's books: Ice Country: One Boy's Adventure in the Arctic with Commander Donald MacMillan (1995) and Timberrr!...A History of Logging in New England (2003). She won the 1999 Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators Work-in-Progress grant. Cowan makes presentations and leads workshops for elementary school groups, and she also speaks to community groups. For more information, contact her through her website.
Jane Cowen-Fletcher's children's picture books have been recommended reading for many groups of children, from those who have a parent with a physical disability to those whose parents want to assure them that they are protected. Cowen-Fletcher lives in South Berwick, Maine, and serves on the South Berwick Public Library Planning Task Force. She was a Peace Corps volunteer in Benin from 1981-1983. Her book It Takes A Village (1993/1994) is based on the African proverb and concept that child-rearing is a community activity. It won the African Studies Association's Younger Children's Book Award and was nominated for the Washington Children's Choice Picture Book Award.
Other books by Cowen-Fletcher are:
Mystery writer David A. Crossman, a Vinalhaven native, lives in Friendship. Previously an advertising and television writer and producer, Crossman published his first book, Murder in a Minor Key in 1994. Unlike his other mysteries, which have a Maine island setting, his first novel is set on an academic campus. Crossman is also the creator of Winston Crisp, a retired National Security agent, and the crime solver in A Show of Hands (1997/1998) and Dead of Winter (1999). Both books are subtitled "Maine Island Mysteries," which suggests Crossman and Down East Books plan to publish more Crisp novels. In addition to his adult mysteries, he's published two children's mysteries, The Secret of the Missing Grave (1999) that also has an island setting; and The Mystery of the Black Moriah (2002; review is second item on page). Crossman visits classrooms to learn students' reactions to his characters and plots.
Crossman also co-wrote You Can't Get Where You're Not Going with Les Francoeur in 1995, and he's a musician and musical composer; he co-wrote the Schooner Fare song " Big House, Middle House, Back House, Barn" with SF's Tom Rowe, an
