Martha Stephens

MARTHA STEPHENS grew up on a working class street in Waycross, Georgia, and has written about Waycross life in her stories and novels.

Stephens taught in the English Department of the University of Cincinnati for many years and was active there around issues of human rights. She lives in Cincinnati today with husband, children, and grandchildren, and often sojourns with peace and justice friends in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Stephens’ new book, Me and the Grandmas of Baghdad, will appear in April 2015. It’s a memoir about growing up in the south, becoming a writer, and developing a deep concern about grandmas like herself in the war-torn places of the world.

Stephens’ novels were written some years ago. Cast a Wistful Eye (Macmillan 1977), was condensed in Redbook in 1976. This is a modest story based on a young couple Stephens knew teaching high school in Homerville, Georgia. It’s about the old country house this couple restored and their emotions around the birth of their first child — their sense of becoming, through this birth, a part of history and all creation.

Stephens’ novel Children of the World (SMU 1994) was reviewed in the NYT and other Sunday book pages.  It describes her mother’s childhood on a dirt street in Jacksonville, Florida, in a household of mentally afflicted individuals, but also her triumph, in the end, over these severe circumstances.

Stephens also writes non-fiction about the struggle for peace in our time and the deep changes needed by all the people of the world. In The Treatment: the Story of Those Who Died in the Cincinnati Radiation Tests (Duke University Press 2002), she describes a group of low-income cancer patients who died in secret military experiments in the hospital of her university. With the help of a student, Stephens located surviving families and helped launch a lawsuit. The suit resulted in 1999 in a large settlement in federal court by the doctors and the Department of Defense.

A discussion about The Treatment appeared on C-Span in 2002, and Stephens has been interviewed on NPR and in the NYT. In 2014 French public television filmed an interview with Stephens in her home in Cincinnati for a documentary on secret U. S. experiments. ##

This writer blogs at marthastephens.wordpress.com