Late Bloomers

Blanche Wiesen Cook

BLANCHE WIESEN COOK is Distinguished Professor of History and Women's Studies at the John Jay College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She was chosen for the honor of Scholar of the Year in 1996 by the New York State Council on the Humanities.

Her most recent book, bestseller Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume Two, was published by Viking Penguin in July 1999; the Penguin paperback was published in June 2000. Volume One, published in 1992, remained on The New York Times bestseller list for three months and received many awards, including the 1992 Biography Prize from The Los Angeles Times, and the Lambda Literary Award. It is now available as a Penguin paperback. Professor Cook is now working on the third and final volume of Eleanor Roosevelt. For the first time, in Cook's biography, "ER" is seen as the most important woman in American political history: an activist, a desiring and desired woman, a person of great independence of spirit, a teacher, writer and crusader for social justice and human rights worldwide.

Blanche Wiesen Cook shares Eleanor Roosevelt's commitment to the principle of greater dignity and security for all women and men, and, in addition to her teaching, writes frequent reviews and columns for many newspapers and periodi¬cals. She has edited and contributed to several anthologies, and is the author of Crystal Eastman On Women & Revolution, and The Declassified Eisenhower, a New York Times Book Review notable book of 1981. For more than twenty years, she also produced and hosted her own program for Radio Pacifica, originally called Activists and Agitators, and later re-titled Women and the World in the 1990s. Professor Cook appears frequently on television, on such programs as The Today Show, Good Morning America, C-Span's Booknotes, and MacNeil Lehrer, where she participated in the joint PBS-NBC coverage of the 1992 Democratic National Convention.

She is the former Vice-President for Research of the American Historical Associa¬tion, and was Vice-President and Chair of the Fund for Open Information and Accountability (FOIA,Inc.) She was also Co-Founder and Co-Chair of the Freedom of Information and Access Committee of the Organization of American Historians, which was actively committed to maintaining the integrity of the Freedom of Information Act. Blanche Wiesen Cook received her Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University in 1970. She lives in New York City.

Joyce Dyer

JOYCE DYER is director of the Lindsay-Crane Center for Writing and Literature at Hiram College in Hiram, Ohio, and John S. Kenyon Professor of English. Dyer is the author of three books, The Awakening: A Novel of Beginnings (1993), In a Tangled Wood: An Alzheimer’s Journey (1996), and Gum-Dipped: A Daughter Remembers Rubber Town (2003), and the editor of Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers (1998). She has published essays in magazines such as North American Review, Southern Literary Journal, and High Plains Literary Review. Dyer has won numerous awards for her writing, including the 1998 Appalachian Book of the Year Award. In 2009, she won the David B. Saunders Award for Creative Nonfiction from Cream City Review and was named co-winner of a national chapbook contest sponsored by Word of Mouth Books. She has served on the staffs of the Highland Summer Conference in Radford, Virginia, the Appalachian Writers Workshop in Hindman, Kentucky, and the Antioch Writers’ Workshop in Antioch, Ohio.

Michael Griffith

MICHAEL GRIFFITH's books are Bibliophilia: A Novella and Stories (2003) and Spikes: A Novel (2001), both from Arcade. He is finishing up a new novel, Trophy, which Arcade is scheduled to bring out in 2009. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Salmagundi, Oxford American, Southwest Review, Golf World, Five Points, Blackbird, The Washington Post, and other periodicals. Griffiths has received fellowships from the Charles Phelps Taft Memorial Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Louisiana Division of the Arts, among other places.

A native of Orangeburg, SC, Griffith earned an AB in Germanic Languages and Literatures from Princeton (summa cum laude) in 1987 and an MFA in Creative Writing from Louisiana State University. From 1992 to 2002 he served as the Associate Editor of The Southern Review. In 2004 he became founding editor of Yellow Shoe Fiction, an original-fiction series from LSU Press. He is now Associate Professor of English at the University of Cincinnati and teaches in the Sewanee School of Letters as well.

Ann Hagedorn

Author and journalist ANN HAGEDORN was born in Dayton, Ohio, earned her undergraduate degree in history from Denison University and graduate degrees from the University of Michigan and Columbia University. Her first journalism job was at the San Jose Mercury News. She has also worked for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Daily News and has written articles for various other publications including the Washington Post. She has taught narrative nonfiction writing at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. She is the award-winning author of four books, all for Simon and Schuster, including A Savage Peace, Wild Ride, Ransom, and Beyond the River. She is currently a Simons Public Humanities Fellow at the Hall Center for the Humanities at the University of Kansas where she is working on her fifth book for Simon & Schuster.

Brad Wigor

BRADLEY WIGOR is a writer, director, and producer, living and working in Los Angeles and Toronto. His most recent independent film premiered 2007 at the Palm Beach International Film Festival, and his Emmy Award-winning film for the Showtime Network, The Sandy Bottom Orchestra, based on the book by Garrison Keillor and Jenny Lind Nilsson, was nominated for the Humanitas Prize. Multiple Emmy award winner Wigor is slated to helm the upcoming RESCUE AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD, a true story of a daring rescue mission to be filmed near the North Pole. Wigor’s other work in television has received numerous awards including the Emmy, the Humanitas Prize, Chicago Film Festival, Ohio State, and National Education Association Awards. For his film, Love in the Dark Ages, Wigor was also nominated for the Directors Guild of America Award.

John Fleischman

JOHN FLEISCHMAN writes science for the American Society for Cell Biology, books for kids and others, and articles for the Harvard Health Letter and Air & Space Smithsonian. He was a science writer at Harvard Medical School, a science broadcaster at Boston’s WGBH (Public Radio), and a senior editor for Yankee and Ohio magazines.

Fleischman is also the author of Mid Century City about Cincinnati photographer Sarge Marsh (2006), Free & Public, a history of the Cincinnati public library (2003), and The Ohio Lands, a natural history book (1995). He has contributed to various magazines including Discover, Smithsonian, Preservation, Audubon, The Atlantic Monthly, Archaeology, Parents, and Muse, He is a native of New York City and a graduate of Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio.

Dale Patrick Brown

DALE PATRICK BROWN retired in 1998 as president/chief executive officer of Sive/Young & Rubicam, a Cincinnati-based advertising agency. In addition to eight and a half years as CEO, her career has included stints as executive vice president at The Martin Agency, a well-known Richmond-based agency; communications manager for Mobil Chemical Company; manager of communications services for Whittaker General Medical; and city news reporter for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, a major daily newspaper in Virginia.

After retirement from advertising, Ms. Brown returned to her early interest in creative writing and has published several articles related to literary history. Her book, Brilliance and Balderdash, featuring original research on such noteworthy authors and lecturers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Herman Melville, was published in 2007.

Ms. Brown holds a BA in journalism and an MA in English from the University of Richmond and completed an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Goucher College in 2005. Her honors and awards include virtually every award given in the advertising world, including two silver medals, the highest awards given by the American Advertising Federation. She serves on several corporate and community boards and is an honorary trustee of the University of Richmond. She has recently been elected as a board member of the Ohio Humanities Council.

Albert Pyle

Before coming to the Mercantile Library, ALBERT PYLE was a full-time free lance writer, contributing to WGUC-FM, The Cincinnati Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Weekly Standard, Cincinnati Magazine, and other publications. He is the author of three crime novels.