BIO:

Brenda is a combination New Englander, Midwesterner, New Yorker, and now Marylander. Born in Beverly, Massachusetts, she moved with her family to the Chicago area as a child but was drawn back to New England for graduate school in American Literature at Brown. She had a rich and satisfying career teaching literature and drama at St. Lawrence University in northern New York state and the University of Connecticut. While teaching, she was able to indulge her passion for American theater and drama by writing a number of books about playwrights like Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, and the experimental Provincetown Players, and editing books like the Cambridge Companion to American Women Playwrights.

Since taking early retirement from UConn, Brenda has had the chance to indulge her desire to write historical fiction. After the passing of her beloved husband George in 2019, she made another life change, moving to Maryland, where she is surrounded by a big and wonderful extended family, as well as deer and horse farms.

As a fiction writer, Brenda is fascinated by ordinary people who are transformed by extraordinary experiences. In her novels and short fiction, she bases her characters on real people who lived such stories. In After the Voyage, there is the Terrett family, based on her own ancestors, who make the ocean voyage from Ireland to Boston in the 1860s and face a new life in a new country. In Becoming Carlotta, there is Hazel Tharsing/Carlotta Monterey, who dreams of being on the stage as a young girl in a small California town in the 1890s. She travels across the continent and the Atlantic to become an actress in London and New York, along the way marrying a member of the British gentry, then a well-known New York artist, and finally the Nobel-Prize-winning playwright Eugene O’Neill. And in When Light Breaks Through, there are Ann Putnam, ringleader of the “afflicted children” who send twenty people to their deaths and many more to jail, wreaking havoc on Salem Village in 1692, and Joseph Green, the 21-year-old schoolteacher who takes on the village ministry afterwards and finds a way to heal both Ann and the village.

Brenda is ready for the next big project.