Susan koppelman biography

The educations of Fannie Hurst

Women's Studies International Forum, 1987

SyuopsIs-Fannie Hurst (1889-1968) was a German-Jewish midw&m American writer. She wrote seventeen... more SyuopsIs-Fannie Hurst (1889-1968) was a German-Jewish midw&m American writer. She wrote seventeen novels, more than two hundred short stories, and as yet uncounted film scripts, radio scripts, articles, and pamphlets. During her lifetime, Fannie Hurst's short stories were popular both with enormous audiences of "general," that is, non-professional, readers, and with literary critics. Fannie Hurst offers scholars from the fields of American literature, American studies, Jewish studies, Black studies, women's studies. American family, social, and labor history, film, radio, and t.v. studies, and popular culture the opportunity to bring into focus the urban economic, family, and cultural aperiencc of lower middle class immigrant and fiit generation Americans who lived during the fust third of the twentieth century as that experience was portrayed in short tlction and film. Hurst's writer's imagination developed with no periods of discontinuity. There were no periods in her personal psychological and intellectual development when she was not making stories. A study of the process by which she became educated, both formally and utra-mslitutionally, will give us new insight into the ways that writers of fiction develop, the ways in which writers transform what they know, aperience, imagine, etc., into fiction. What it was that allowed her to feel such a stron8 sense of vocation when everything in her envhonment militated against such a self-image is still a mystery. In her autobiography and in autobiographical reminiscences, she describes various strands in her pemonal history that constituted, for her, her education. The apparently contradictory self-images of Fannie Hurst as naive, self-created artist sprung from nowhere and as

Susan Huddis Koppelman was born 1940 to Edward and Frances Koppelman. She lived the majority of her childhood and adolescence in the Cleveland, Ohio area. She attended Barnard College for her undergraduate degree; however, due to her father’s untimely death she finished her undergraduate degree at Case-Western Reserve focusing her studies on English, Psychology, and Economics. She married John Cornillon in 1961 and they had one son together, Nathan Cornillon. Susan and John later divorced and Susan remarried Dennis Mills. Susan currently lives in Arizona.

Susan’s interest in writing started when she was very young. In high school she was known for her fantastic writing abilities. She always had an avid interest in literature and began studying it in college. In her studies she began to formulate her opinions on women’s rights and other social justice. After graduating from Case-Western Reserve, Susan obtained her Master’s degree from the Ohio State University in 1969 with a focus on English and American Literature. After obtaining her Master’s degree Susan spent some years teaching at various schools but she and her husband, John Cornillon, also worked at and maintained an Adult Education facility as well. In 1975 she obtained her Ph.D. from Bowling Green State University with a focus on American Literature and Popular Culture, and in the summer of 1975 she continued her studies with a Post-Doctoral Certificate in Higher Education Administration from the University of Wisconsin.

Her professional employment throughout her career is as impressive as her academic studies. From 1962-1967 she worked as a substitute teacher in the Public Schools of Boston. 1966-1969 she served as the Executive Director for an Adult Education Program in Bedford, Mass. At Tufts University she served as a teacher and Curriculum Advisor for the Upward bound Program from 1967-1968. Her work became more focused on her studies of English in 1969 when she obtained

Alix Kates Shulman is the award-winning author of 15 books of fiction, memoir, biography, essays, and books for children. The NY Times hailed her "the voice that has for three decades provided a lyrical narrative of the changing position of women in American society." Her books range from her million-copy debut novel Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, now a feminist classic, to the Library of America anthology Women's Liberation!: Feminist Writings that Inspired a Revolution and Still Can (co-edited with Honor Moore).

A lifelong political activist, Alix attended the 1963 March for Equality in Washington, DC, where Martin Luther King, Jr., declared his dream, and joined New York City's first women's liberation group in 1967. She received a Clara Lemlich Award for a lifetime of social activism in 2018.

Her books have been published in twelve languages, and her writing has appeared in, among other publications, The Atlantic, The NY Times, The Nation, The Guardian, Dissent, Salon, n+1, Tikkun. Her books for adults are all available as ebooks, and most also in paper.

For reviews of her books and biographical details, see her website: www.AlixKShulman.com.