Mary gordon author biography in the background

Mary Gordon is an award-winning social entrepreneur, educator, best-selling author, parenting expert, and child advocate who has created an international children’s charity, Roots of Empathy (ROE). 

Ms. Gordon has consulted with and/or presented to the UN, the WHO, UNICEF, The Nelson Mandela Children’s Foundation, and to governments. She is a regular keynote speaker at conferences and has several TEDx talks. She has been honoured with the Governor General of Canada Award for innovation, is a recipient of the Order of Canada, Order of Ontario, and Order of Newfoundland and Labrador, and is also the recipient of honorary doctorates in Canada and Europe. Ms. Gordon has also been an Ashoka Fellow since 2002, and sits on the executive board of the Ashoka global organization. 

Ms. Gordon is considered a serial social entrepreneur. In 1981 she created Canada’s first and largest school-based Parenting Centres which have been used as best practice models internationally. In 1996, based on her belief that the absence of empathy underscored violence of all kinds, she set out to break this cycle by developing empathy in children. As a result, she created the ROE program and shortly after her organization of the same name. In 2005, she created The Seeds of Empathy program for children in child care settings.

The ROE program has been evaluated in both comparative and randomized controlled studies in independent research that has been conducted in numerous countries across three continents. Both Mary Gordon and the program have been featured in the New York Times, the LA Times, the Guardian, The Washington Post, Time Magazine, and in features on NBC’s Today Show, PBS, CNN, The BBC, NHK Japan, and the Huffington Post. Her work is cited in thousands of academic publications. 

Her book, Roots of Empathy: Changing the World Child by Child, a Canadian bestseller is available in multiple languages.

It's a relief, really. Mary Gordon seems no more inclined to answer deeply personal questions than I am to ask them.

Of course, the questions flutter at the periphery of our conversation about her collection of meditative, autobiographical essays, Seeing Through Places: Reflections on Geography and Identity. How can I not wonder about the pain of a child who dreams of fairy princesses and kisses the knee of "Grandpa" Haubrecht in hopes of forming some sentimental connection with the old man, only to recognize in his unbending silence that she is not the magical child of her imagination, and probably not even a child at all? Or the desperation of a 15-year-old living alone with her alcoholic mother in increasing dishevelment, who hears a bird trapped in her closet struggling toward death and reacts by pulling her clothes from the closet, laying them on a chair, and never opening the closet again until it is time to go to college?

But, really, what more could I actually learn by asking Gordon about her implacable grandmother or her cruel aunt? Her mother and the priests who "embodied her idea of the desirable male"? Or the fact that her father, who died when she was seven, was the only person she liked to play with?

In these eight linked essays about the places that have shaped her sensibility—as in her recent memoir about her father, The Shadow Man, and her novels Final Payments and The Company of Women—Gordon writes with such brilliant specificity and with such sensitivity to the fine gradations of human emotion that readers simply infer the answers to such questions. To actually ask them is a betrayal of one of the deepest pleasures of reading writers as good as Gordon: that sense of one mind and spirit connecting with another's. To ask also invites a kind of reductive pop psychologizing. Or worse, the commodification of spirit, which is a sorry hallmark of our era, and an increasing concern for Gordon.

(Mary Catherine Gordon)

PERSONAL:

Born December 8, 1949, in Far Rockaway, Long Island, NY; daughter of David (a writer and publisher) and Anna (a legal secretary) Gordon; married James Brian (an English professor), 1974 (marriage ended); married Arthur Cash (a professor of English), December 1, 1979; children: (second marriage) Anna Gordon, David Dess Gordon. Education: Barnard College, B.A., 1971; Syracuse University, M.A., 1973. Religion: Roman Catholic. Hobbies and other interests: Theology and musical comedy.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY. Office—Department of English, Barnard College, 3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027-6501.

CAREER:

Writer. Dutchess Community College, Poughkeepsie, NY, teacher of English, 1974-78; Amherst College, Amherst, MA, teacher of English, 1979; Barnard College, New York, NY, Millicent C. McIntosh Professor of English, 1988—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, University of Rochester, 1979, for Final Payments, and 1981, for The Company of Women; O. Henry Award for best short story, 1997, for "City Life" in Ploughshares magazine; Guggenheim fellowship; Lila Acheson Wallace/Reader's Digest Writer's Award; O.B. Hardison Award, Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies, for Joan of Arc.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

Final Payments, Random House (New York, NY), 1978.

The Company of Women, Random House (New York, NY), 1981.

Men and Angels, Random House (New York, NY), 1985.

The Other Side, Viking (New York, NY), 1989.

Spending: A Utopian Divertimento, Scribner (New York, NY), 1998.

Pearl, Pantheon (New York, NY), 2005.

Circling My Mother, Pantheon (New York, NY), 2007.

SHORT STORIES

Temporary Shelter, Random House (New York, NY), 1987.

The Rest of Life: Three Novellas, Viking (New York, NY), 1993.

The Stories of Mary Gordon, Pantheon (New York, NY), 2006.

AUTHOR OF INTRODUCTION

D. Appelbaum, editor, Bridges: Poets of Dutchess and Ulster Counties, Springtow

American writer and scholar

This article is about the American writer. For the British novelist Mary Charlotte Julia Gordon, see Mrs. Disney Leith.

Mary Catherine Gordon (born December 8, 1949) is an American writer from Queens and Valley Stream, New York. She is the McIntosh Professor of English at Barnard College. She is best known for her novels, memoirs and literary criticism. In 2008, she was named Official State Author of New York.

Early life and education

Mary Gordon was born in Far Rockaway, New York, to Anna (Gagliano) Gordon, an Irish-Italian Catholic mother, and David Gordon, who was also Catholic. Her father died in 1957 when she was young. She strongly identified with him and his love for writing and culture, and continued to learn his myths.

After being widowed, her mother Anna moved from Queens with Mary to live with her own mother, who was Irish Catholic, in Valley Stream, a nearby Nassau County suburb. Anna worked as a secretary to support the three of them. Gordon was reared and educated as Catholic, immersed in a largely Irish Catholic neighborhood. She attended Holy Name of Mary School in Valley Stream and The Mary Louis Academy for high school in Jamaica, New York.

Although her mother and her family wanted Gordon to go to a Catholic college, she pursued attending Barnard College and was awarded a scholarship there. She was the first graduate from her high school to go to an Ivy League school; she received her A.B. in 1971. She pursued graduate work, completing an M.A. in English at Syracuse University in 1973.

Gordon published her first novel, Final Payments, in 1978. It became a New York Times bestseller and received a literary prize. She continued to write. It was not until she was in her 40s that Gordon learned very different information about her father. He was born into a Jewish family in Vilna, Lithuania and named Israel. They immigr