A dark and rainy Friday night still did not deter a small audience who came to Porter Square Books to hear about American Luthier. A great surprise to see two old friends who first came to the early meetings of the Boston Biography Group—Mary-Lou Breitborde and Louise Swiniarski—who had come just to root on a fellow biographer who had finally reached the light at the end of the tunnel!
Mary-Lou, Associate Dean of Education at Salem State, and Louise, professor emeritus at Salem State co-authored Teaching on Principle and Promise, The Foundations of Education. Mary-Lou is working on the story of Laura M. Towne (1825-1901), educator, reformer and co-founder of the Penn School of St. Helena Island, SC, in 1862, for slaves freed during the Civil War, now the Penn Center for the preservation of Gullah and Geechee culture. Louise is working on the biography of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804-1894), American Transcendentalist, publisher, writer and educational performer, focusing on her twenty-year correspondence with British Poet Laureate William Wordsworth.
The marathon of biography is that of a lonely runner—so biographers need the encouragement of community to keep going. In 2006, this need for community inspired the creation of the Boston Biographers Group–when I met—and was spurred on by—the late Margery Heffron—author of Louisa Catherine—The Other Mrs. Adams, 2014. This was also the year that BIO—Biographers International Organization—was founded to celebrate the genre of biography and support and acknowledget he accomplishments of biographers around the globe.