M. K. Hammond
Author Biography
Former math teacher and newspaper columnist M. K. Hammond now spends her time writing, teaching Bible studies at church, and singing Jewish music with a community chorale. Her volunteer work includes tutoring students in math and reading through the Durham (NC) Literacy Council.
Hammond earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Duke University and a master’s degree from Southern Connecticut State University. She taught high school and college math for several years before stopping to raise her children. Volunteer work with an agency specializing in energy efficiency led her to write a weekly newspaper column called “Conserving Energy Dollars.” Among her subsequent published writings are two historical novels and articles on various topics, such as literature and music.
Most of the action in her second novel takes place in Worms, a city on the Rhein River. Hammond first visited Worms as a nine-year-old child when her father was stationed in Germany with the American Army. Since then she has gone back many times to stay with relatives. On one such occasion in the 1990’s, while touring the reconstructed Jewish quarter of the city, Hammond first entered the “Rashi Chapel” attached to the synagogue and the nearby “Rashi Museum.” Her cousin explained that Rashi, whose actual name was Solomon ben Isaac, lived in Worms in the middle ages. He was a rabbi so renowned for his wisdom that people came from all over Europe to ask his advice on legal, religious, and social questions. Not only Jews sought his counsel, but Christians too.
Upon returning home, Hammond read books and articles about Jews in medieval Europe as well as biographies of Rashi. In The Rabbi of Worms, the beloved “Rabbi Scholomo,” as the people call him, is both the title character and the inspiration for the story. The author (and the characters in the book) admire his scholarship, perseverance, insight into events of his day, and faithfulness to what he believed. Having a mixed religious heritage herself, Hammond is especially interested in historical relations between Jews and Christians, a topic of this book.
Her previous book, an epistolary novel called Balm in Gilead/Writings of Jeremiah was published by Wipf and Stock in 2007. It consists of letters the prophet Jeremiah might have written to his uncle in exile during the Babylonian captivity of 597-538 B.C.E. The biblical book of Jeremiah, while facinating, is a jumbled mass of history, personal anecdotes, wise sayings, and dire predictions, all very hard to sort out and follow. Hammond’s account is more sequential and therefore easier to read and understand.
When not working, Hammond is an avid reader of historical fiction and a devoted bicycle rider. One of her favorite roles is grandmother to four delightful children. Her current literary project is transcribing and translating letters written by her grandparents in Argentina and Germany, dating from the early twentieth century. In all her reading and research, Hammond finds that human nature has not changed much in the many centuries of recorded history.
