Julia MacDonnell

Julia MacDonnell grew up, mostly outside Boston, the second oldest of eight in a Scotch-Irish Catholic family. During her lifetime, her family leaped, via education, from immigrant manual labor (shipbuilding) to the white-collar professional class of educators and engineers. Her own work life, driven by her family’s enduring work ethic, began when she was an adolescent. On Sunday mornings in a small deli in Plainville, Massachusetts, she made yard-long Italian grinders for flocks of the faithful heading home after church. They always sold out before the line ended. After that, in no particular order, MacDonnell earned her keep as a fast food counter girl, a deliverer of hospital food trays, a gluer of velvet boxes on a production line in a rosary bead factory, a circus performer, a dancer in a traveling nightclub act in Latin America, a fitting model for a pattern cutter and a waitress at several high-end Manhattan restaurants. Her first artistic passion was dance – with her sister Jane she was, at four years old, enrolled in Anna Garrity’s School of Dance where she learned tap and jazz and ‘acrobatics.’ She went on to a serious study of the work of Alvin Ailey and Martha Graham. Dance and writing continued as her dual loves until, in her twenties, she devoted herself to the written word. Her journalism and literary writing have been recognized with two fiction fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, two Geraldine R. Dodge Fellowships for residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, two residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship, and two Pushcart nominations. Familial relationships have remained an abiding concern throughout MacDonnell’s writing career and especially in her new collection, The Topography of Hidden Stories. The thirteen stories in this book also pay homage to her many varied experiences growing up. Reviewer Jon Michael Thomas said the ordinary conflicts in these stories are "transformed to majesty, not only by her exquisite word craft but by the depth of her compassion for the human condition, especially within families." Another reviewer, Leslie Jones, said these stories stories "remind us of how far women have come in their right to equality. Each of the women faces their own traumas and personal battles as they search for their own voice and opinions to be heard." MacDonnell’s second novel, Mimi Malloy, At Last!, published by Picador in 2014, was chosen as an ‘Indie Next’ selection by the ABA. People Magazine called it, “Cathartic, suspenseful and droll…Mimi offers a hopeful take on both old age and bad blood.” Her first, A Year of Favor, based loosely on the murders of the four churchwomen in El Salvador in 1979, was published in 1994 by William Morrow & Co. Kirkus praised it as “Powerful first fiction…A convincing evocation of life in a Central American country…and a compelling portrait of a gutsy, post-feminist heroine.” MacDonnell is professor emeritus in the Writing Arts department at Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J. where she taught undergraduate and graduate writing classes, and developed the creative writing curriculum for its Master of Arts in Writing program. She is a former nonfiction editor of Philadelphia Stories and is now a frequent contributor of book reviews and author interviews to the magazine.