Frances Garrett Connell

A graduate of Barnard College, with a Masters from the University of Virginia and a Doctorate from Columbia, and mother of three amazingly diverse and well-travelled and well-read sons, Frances Connell has been published in more than three dozen literary magazines and anthologies, and in the Washington Post and The Christian Science Monitor. She completed eight oral histories under the imprimatur of her own company, A Reminiscence Sing, and another 67 for the Barnard College Class of '71 Oral History project . She previously taught writing, oral history and international development at the University of Pennsylvania, Kabul University, St. Mary's Seminary and University (Baltimore), George Mason University, and Montgomery College, and ran refugee and repatriation programs in the Maryland, Virginia and D.C. area. Currently, she teaches for the University of Maryland Global Campus. Her books include: The Authoring of Selves: Literacy and its Indigenous Forms in a Traditional Afghan Village nonfiction); The Rest is Silence ( poems); Down Rivers of Windfall Night (novel), Children Kept from the Sun (photos and memoir); Between the Shadow and the Soul (poems); With One Fool Left in the World, No One is Stranded:Scenes from an Earlier Afghanistan ( nonfiction); The Only Thing I Was Fit For (R), A novel; The Stories (novella); Terrafina and Earth Silk ( poems); and Around (Half) the World by Boat (travel memoir).

She lives in New York City and works with immigrant detainees seeking asylum and a new life, and environmental groups struggling to save " the beloved Earth."