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!
Laura Rankin, a children's book writer and illustrator living in York Harbor and working as a library assistant at the Wells Public Library, grew up in Western New York. She received her B.A. in speech and drama from the University of New Hampshire in 1975, worked as a courtroom illustrator for a TV station in Buffalo, New York, then spent 15 years as an editorial artist for The Buffalo News (1977-1992). She received an honorary doctorate from the University at Buffalo, State University of New York in 1996.
She's written these books for children:
... and has illustrated these children's books:
Rankin makes personal appearances at schools, libraries, bookstores, etc., for young audiences (grades 1-5).
Poet Patricia Ranzoni was born in Lincoln and grew up in Bucksport; she and her husband returned to the farm she grew up on and raised their three children. Her undergraduate and and advanced degrees are from the University of Maine, Orono. She has had a career in education and mental health and says her poetry has evolved from Maine folk tradition.
Her books includepoetry collections Claiming, published in 1995 by Puckerbrush Press; Settling (2000); Only Human: Poems from the Atlantic Flyway (2005).
Ranzoni is a co-founder of the cross-cultural SpiritWords/Maine Poetries Collaborative. For more information, visit Ranzoni's website (out of date as of summer 2006).
Van Reid's family has lived in Edgecomb since the 1800s. Reid and his wife Margaret Hunter, a marine biologist at the Dept. of Marine Resources in Boothbay Harbor, live with their two children, Hunter and Mary, in a house Reid and his brother built on his family's land. Reid did not attend college, prefering to develop his own style, but he has worked many jobs, including carpet layer, hospital orderly, theatre reviewer and book columnist, and since 1990 has worked at the Maine Coast Book Shop. Reid also performs in local theatre.
Reid's books are a series taking place in the late 1800s on coastal Maine. They have been described as having "lemonade-at-the-fair" freshness; his vivid characters and humour have been compared with John Irving's; and the books are admittedly influenced by Dicken's The Pickwick Papers. His first book, Cordelia Underwood, or, the Marvelous Beginnings of the Moosepath League (1998) was first serialised in the Lincoln County Weekly newspaper, from 1995-1997, and was quickly picked up by Penguin Putnam, who offered him a contract for a series of three books, which the editors thought would appeal to readers looking for "gentle fiction." The second in the series is Mollie Peer, or, The Underground Adventures of the Moosepath League (1999/2000; Rambles review of Mollie Peer and New York Times mini-review of Mollie Peer) and the third is Daniel Plainway, or, the Holiday Haunting of the Moosepath League (2000; Rambles review of Daniel Plainway). In 2003, the fourth book, Mrs. Roberto, or the Widowy Worries of the Moosepath League, was published, and the fifth (and final) installment in the series, Fiddler's Green, involving an epic wedding, a society ball and a bizarre backwoods feud, in July 2004. He also published Peter Loon: A Novel (2002), another work of historical fiction, set in Maine (Massachusetts at the time), after the Revolutionary War.
For more, check out Reid's website. The Boothbay Harbor Register also provides information about Reid.
Best known for her first book We Took To the Woods (1942; about the Rangeley Lake area), Rich was born in Huntington, Mass. and died in Mattapoisett, Mass., but wrote many books about life in rural northwestern Maine. She got her B.Sc. from Massachusetts State Teachers' College in 1924 and worked as a high school English teacher before she became a writer. She and her husband, Ralph Eugene Rich, lived in a camp on the Rapid River in Maine from the time they were married until he died in 1945. After his death, Rich supported herself and her two children through her writing. Biographical info on Rich is available through BarnesandNoble.com, as well as in Alice Arlen's print biography of Rich, titled She Took To The Woods (2001).
Rich's other works include:
Richards was born in Boston, the daughter of Julia Ward Howe and Samuel Gridley Howe, and was educated in Boston schools. She married the architect Henry Richards in 1871 and they moved to Gardiner, Maine, in 1876.
Richards' first published works appeared in 1873, nonsense rhymes and nursery songs in St. Nicholas. Her best-known book is Captain January (1890), which sold 300,000 copies and was twice made into a movie. Besides writing the books listed below, Richards also edited her father's 2-volume Letters and Journals (1906-1909); she founded the Women's Philanthropic Union in 1895 and was president for 26 years; she was president of the Maine Consumers' League from 1905-1911. She and her husband operated Camp Merryweather for 30 years, a pioneering camp for boys. She died in Gardiner. Gardiner Public Library provides background on Richards and a link to photos of her and of the Richards' house in Gardiner.
Richards' books include:
Born in Wisconsin, Rielly earned a B.A. from Loras College (Dubuque, IA) in 1968 and a masters and Ph.D. (1974) in English from the Univ. of Notre Dame. He first taught in an elementary school, then a high school, and then at Ambrose College (Davenport, IA). He moved to Maine in 1978 where he lives in Westbrook with his wife (their children are grown) and serves as chairperson of the English department and director of the honors program at St. Joseph's College in Standish.
His works include many articles, book reviews, and short stories, as well as poetry, a literature text, and a baseball dictionary:
Roberts, who was born in Kennebunk's Storer Mansion and in 1938 built a home called Rocky Pastures in Kennebunkport, graduated from Cornell University in 1908, served in World War I, and was a correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post until he quit in 1928 to write his many historical novels and his books of essays and other non-fiction, most set in New England. He won a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation in 1957 for "his historical novels which have long contributed to the creation of greater interest in our early American history."
Edgar Allen Beem, in an Aug. 1997 issue of Downeast magazine about Roberts' symbolic novel, Boon Island, calls Roberts "an enormously popular novelist..., an ultra-conservative Republican who inveighed in print against the New Deal and against America's liberal immigration policy." It is said that he so hated Franklin Roosevelt that he glued Roosevelt dimes to the clamshells he used as ashtrays, the better to grind ashes into FDR's face! His friend and summer neighbor, Booth Tarkington, apparently shared his political views. More information about Roberts is available online through Suite 101 and in Maine: An Encyclopedia. The University of New Hampshire Library has some of Roberts correspondence, publications, and other papers.
Incidentally, Roberts' niece, Marjorie Mosser, collected the recipes published in her book, Good Maine Food (1939; 1947), for which Roberts wrote the introduction and notes.
Novelist Robichaud was born in St. Evariste de Batice, Quebec, and moved to Lewiston as a child. At 12, he enrolled in a Montreal pre-seminary school to study to be a priest. He did not become a priest and returned to the States and worked in a Connecticut bank before moving to New York City. From 1941 to 1945 he served in the U.S. Army where his fellow soldiers enjoyed his stories about his family. After the war he returned to New York City. In the early 1950s he enrolled in a Columbia University writing program. The stories he told his Army buddies and his wife became the basis for his novel Papa Martel (1961), which is included in The Mirror Of Maine. The book, whose plot spans 1919 to 1937, is the story of the Martel family, Franco-Americans who live in Groveton, Maine. The book was republished by the University of Maine Press in 2003. Robichaud's other novel is The Apple of His Eye (1965), which is set in a small French Catholic town.
Robichaud received an honory degree from the Unversity of Maine in 1991.
Born in the village of Head Tide, Maine (about 10 miles from Wiscasset), and raised in Gardiner, Robinson became popular after Teddy Roosevelt wrote a favorable review of his second book of poems (The Children of the Night 1897) in 1905. Although Robinson lived in New York City (where he worked for the Customs House for years, one of several jobs arranged by Roosevelt) and in Peterboro, NH (summering in-residence at MacDowell Colony) most of his adult life, many of his poems draw on his experiences and the people he knew in Gardiner. Robinson's literary inspirations were the Bible, Shakespeare, Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and Melville. He also liked Sherlock Holmes mysteries and the music of Gilbert and Sullivan.
Books of poetry, besides Children of the Night, include:
Plays include Van Zorn (1914) and The Porcupine (1915).
His poems "Miniver Cheevy," "Richard Cory," and "Tilbury Town" are all said to be inspired by people of Gardiner. Sixteen poems by Robinson are available through Poet's Corner. For more on studying Robinson's poetry, the Houghton Mifflin Heath Anthology has an excellent page, with bibliography and questions for discussion. You can also find out more about Robinson's life through
Born in New York City and educated at Harvard and Brown (1995 M.F.A. in Writing), John Robinson lives in Portland. He is the author of Kilimanjaro Burning, his masters thesis, which was published in 1997. It is a novella whose central character is the devious ex-patriot Monroe, who lives in Tanzania. The Sapphire Sea (2003), is a thriller, in which he recounts the adventures of New York jewel dealer Lonny Cushman as he attempts to smuggle a large sapphire out of Madagascar. He is currently writing a novel set in central Africa.
On Robinson's web site, he writes briefly about his world-wide traveling and his many jobs such as commercial fisherman, teacher, safari guide, gem dealer, and book reviewer. Also on the site are photos from his time in Tanzania and Madagascar and a chapter from Kilimanjaro Burning.
Born in Natick, Massachusetts, Lewis Robinson grew up in Yarmouth, Maine. He is a graduate of Milton Academy (1989) and of Middlebury College, and he received an M.A. from the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. He lives in Portland, Maine, where he teaches writing and coaches girls' soccer and basketball at Waynefleet School. His highly praised first book, Officer Friendly and Other Stories, is set in small-town Maine. Some of the stories had previously been published in literary magazines, and one, "The Diver," was read on National Public Radio's Selected Shorts in the spring of 2003. Robinson's comments concerning his writing can be read on the Milton Academy web site. He was one of ten writers who received $35,000 Whiting Writers Award in 2003, which is given to emerging writers of "exceptional talent and promise."
Educated at Philips Andover, Yale, and the Columbia University School of Journalism, Neil Rolde lives now in York. He has been variously described as a politician, philanthropist, environmentalist, publisher, health care policy analyst, writer, and historian. He was District 106's (York and part of Kittery) representative in the Maine House for 16 years. He also served as an assistant to Kenneth M. Curtis, governor from 1967 to 1975. Rolde's last political campaign was in 1990 when he ran for U.S. Senator but lost to William Cohen, the incumbent.
Rolde is well known for his generous gifts of time and money to numerous Maine non-profit organizations. Boards and charities on which he has served as a trustee, adviser, or chairman include the York Hospital, The Foundation for Blood Research, Maine Public Broadcasting Corporation, the Maine Joint Select Committee on Substance Abuse - Subcommittee on Public/Private Partnerships, Maine Businesses for Social Responsibility, the Maine Humanities Council, and the Maine Children's Alliance. His environmental concerns are reflected in his commitment to the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences, where he has served as chair of the Board of Trustees. In 1998 the Maine Sierra Club presented Rolde with a certificate of recognition for his environmental activism. Rolde has also won the Maine Initiative's Golden Grower Philanthropy Award and serves on its board of advisors.
Rolde is the owner of Tilbury House, a Gardiner publishing company named after E.A. Robinson's "Tilbury Town." In addition to his work on the 1998 Commission on Children's Health Care, Rolde is the author of
and of the article, published in the Spring/Summer 1993 issue of Connections: New England's Journal of Higher Education and Economic Development, entitled "It's Primary Care, Stupid! Health Care Reform's Message to Medical Schools."
Rolde is one of Maine's best-known and well-respected historians. In 1998 the Maine Historical Society awarded him the Neal W. Allen Award for "outstanding contributions in the field of Maine history and genealogy." His Maine histories include
Rolde has also published
The latter was a home version of the popular WCBB television quiz show of the same name. He is also a contributor to the revised edition of Greatest Mountain: Katahdin's Wilderness: Excerpts from the Writings of Percival Proctor Baxter (1999). Rolde has written the introduction to another Katahdin-related book, George T. Sewall's To Katahdin: The 1876 Adventures of Four Young Men and a Boat (2000), an illustrated travel journal.
Bill Roorbach and his wife, the painter Juliet Karelsen, and their daughter Elysia live in Farmington, Maine, which Roorbach says reminds him of the 1950s Connecticut in which he was raised. They bought their farmhouse there in 1992, while Roorbach was teaching in the English dept. at the University of Maine at Farmington, and they lived in the house summers and other months while Roorbach worked at Ohio State University (1995-2001), before moving back to Maine for good in 2001. Raised in the Connecticut suburbs of NYC (New Canaan), Roorbach attended Ithaca College in the 1970s, then played piano in bands, traveled widely, worked as a bartender, and briefly on a cattle ranch. He received his M.F.A. in fiction writing from Columbia University in 1990.
For four years (1991-1995), he taught non-fiction writing at the University of Maine at Farmington. He recently was associate professor in Ohio State University's Master of Fine Art writing program and fiction editor of the Ohio State University Press, quitting this job to write full time in Farmington soon after his daughter was born there (21 Sept. 2000). He's also taught at the University of Vermont Summer Writing Program (1995-1999), Stone Coast Writers Conference (1993, 1994), Maine Publishers and Writers Alliance conferences (1992, 1994, 1998, 2001), Cape Cod Writers Conference (2000), and others. Roorbach is teaching writing courses and workshops in Maine and will be a Colby College visiting professor. For more, read an interview with Roorbach by the publishers of The Smallest Color.
Roorbach is the author of the memoir Summers with Juliet (1992); the non-fiction Writing Life Stories: How to Make Memories into Memoirs, Ideas into Essays, and Life into Literature (1998); a short story collection, Big Bend (2001), two of whose nine stories are set in Maine, winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction; and editor of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: The Art of Truth (2001; Truth reviewed in the Chronicle of Higher Education). The title story of Big Bend is available online through Atlantic Monthly and was featured on NPR's 'Selected Shorts' program in Feb. 2002, read by Babe actor James Cromwell; it's already included in several story anthologies. His first novel, The Smallest Color (2001), pivots on a long-held and destructive secret. Film rights for the novel have been sold to Deep River Productions/Bona Fide Productions. A collection of Roorbach's essays, Into Woods and Other Essays, a sequel to Summers With Juliet, was published in 2002; the Bangor (ME) Daily News carried a review of Into Woods in Feb. 2002. His seventh book, Temple Stream: A Rural Odyssey (2005), "an exploratory account of his local woodlands as a microcosm of the natural world," is non-fiction about his life on the western banks of the Temple Stream, near Farmington.
Other work, both fiction and nonfiction, has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Granta, New York Magazine, Poets and Writers, The Iowa Review, Witness, Newsday, and others. Honors include a MacDowell Colony fellowship, a Bread Loaf Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction, and two Ohio Arts Councils Grants (both 1999), one in Creative Nonfiction, one in Criticism, as well as a 2002 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. You can read his non-fiction work, "Scioto Blues," in a 1999 issue of The Missouri Review online.
Ken Rosen lives in Portland, Maine, and is a professor at the University of Southern Maine and the founder of the Stonecoast Writers' Conference in Brunswick, ME. His poems have appeared in the Paris Review, the Beloit Poetry Journal, Agni, The Massachusetts Review, and Salt Hill Journal; you can read his poem "The Return" in the 1996-1997 issue. Rosen has also taught at Syracuse University, the American University in Bulgaria, and the University of Sofia (Bulgaria). He was a Fulbright Professor to Bulgaria in 1998-99, and with Alexander Shurbanov is co-editor of an anthology of contemporary Bulgarian poetry, Dandelion Bone.
Rosen has written several books of poetry: Whole Horse (1972), Black Leaves (1980), The Hebrew Lion (won 1988 Maine Arts Commission poetry competition), Longfellow Square (1991), Reptile Mind (1993), and No Snake, No Paradise (1996).
A native of the Riverside, California area -- where he now lives with wife Trish -- Jim Rozhon lived in Portland, ME for seven years between 1984 and 1991, working as production supervisor for the Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram in South Portland.
He's written a series of six mysteries centering on the Collins family: A Matter Of Faith (April 2002); A Slight Difference Of Opinion (July 2002); A Small Fire In The Forest (August 2002); The End Of Time (December 2002); Melodie's Song (May 2003); and Sibling Rivalry (2003).
Born in Johnstown, NY and raised in Gloversville, NY, Richard Russo left home to attend the University of Arizona and now lives in Camden, Maine, in an 1846 house with a harbor view, with his wife, Barbara, and his two daughters. He taught English and American literature for 20 years as a college professor, including courses in creative writing at Colby College in Waterville. He still teaches summer writing seminars at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. Russo was national chair of the 1995 Share Our Strength benefit, which raised money through over 300 book readings for hunger relief.
His novels are Mohawk (1986/1994), The Risk Pool (1988, to be produced as a film in 2008), Nobody's Fool (1993; 1994 film starring Paul Newman), Straight Man (1997; reading group guide to Straight Man), and Empire Falls, which won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2001; excerpt from Empire Falls), set in a once-thriving town in central Maine. Actor Paul Newman co-produced the film based on Empire Falls for HBO, playing Max Roby, a shiftless house painter and father of the key character. Joanne Woodward played Francine Whiting, who owns half of Empire Falls.
Russo has also published a collection of stories, The Whore's Child (2002), which was reviewed in the New York Times. Russo collaborated on two other screenplays, both of which starred Paul Newman: "Nobody's Fool" and "Twilight" (originally titled "Magic Hour"). His teleplay for "Flamingo Rising" was shown on Hallmark Hall of Fame in the winter of 2000-2001. He also wrote the screenplay for the movie "Keeping Mum" (2006), starring Rowan Atkinson, and for the 2005 film The Ice Harvest. His fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, and The New York Times Magazine.
The New York Times featured Russo in June 2001; its page on him includes reviews of his books, articles about and by Russo, recent links to other reviews and excerpts, a photo, and audio readings. A 2002 interview with Russo can be found at identity theory's website, and the text of his 2004 commencement address at Colby College on their website.
