Cleveland, Ceil 1940-

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CLEVELAND, Ceil 1940-

PERSONAL: Born January 10, 1940, in Olton, TX; daughter of Joe Donaldson Cleveland Slack (a rancher and teacher) and Margaret Ellen (an artist and teacher; maiden name, Gowdy) Slack; married Donald R. Waldrip (marriage ended); married Jerrold K. Footlick, 1984; children: Wendy, Tim, Jay. Education: Whitworth College, B.A. (cum laude), 1968; Midwestern University, M.A. (with honors), 1971; attended writing program at Columbia University, 1977-79; attended University of Cincinnati, 1974-76. Hobbies and other interests: Music, theater, travel, gardening.

ADDRESSES: Home—4010 Wynford Place, Durham, NC 27707. Office—Shimkin Hall, Room 228, New York University, NY, 10012. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Scriptwriter for educational television, Spokane, WA, 1966-69, and Dallas, TX, 1970-72; Cincinnati Arts and Humanities Consortium, Cincinnati, OH, director of curriculum, 1972-74; University Press, University of Cincinnati, associate editor, 1974-76; Columbia—The Magazine of Columbia University, New York, NY, founder and editor-in-chief, 1976-86; Cleveland Communications, Inc. (marketing and editorial projects organization), founder and president, 1986—; Queens College of the City University of New York, vice president for university relations, 1991-95; State University of New York at Stony Brook, vice president for university affairs and associate professor of English and women's studies, 1995-98, currently adjunct professor. Cofounder, Syzygy: A Journal of Short Fiction, 1976; founder, Cincinnati Women's Press, and Brook (magazine), c. 1996. Lecturer at colleges, including University of Cincinnati and Xavier University, c. 1972-74, Washington College, Rhodes College, Goucher College, and Austin College. Lonesome Dove Inn, Archer City, TX, proprietor.

MEMBER: American Council on Education (coordinator of women's program, NY metro area, 1994—); Council for Advancement and Support of Education (trustee).

AWARDS, HONORS: Gold Award, Educational Publishers, and Magazine of the Decade Award, Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), both for Columbia—The Magazine of Columbia University. Ohio Arts Council grant; Woodrow Wilson teaching fellow; Outstanding Alumnus Award, Midwestern University, 2003; named Redmond Reader, Whitworth College, 2002; Virginia Center for Creative Arts grant, 2002.

WRITINGS:

NONFICTION

Whatever Happened to Jacy Farrow? (memoir), University of North Texas Press (Denton, TX), 1997.

Better Punctuation in 30 Minutes a Day (reference book), Career Press (Franklin Lakes, NJ), 2003.

For Better and for Words (reference book), McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 2005.

Author of Iron, Gold, and Bronze Women, and a Few Made of Steel: Three Generations of Women and Their Relationship to Work, a research study for Queens College of the City University of New York, 1994, and In the World of Literature, a literary quiz book. Contributor to New York Times, Working Woman, New York Woman, Houston Post, Chronicle of Higher Education, Cincinnati Enquirer, Gannet Center Journal, and Information Age, among many other periodicals, journals, and newspapers.

NOVELS

The Bluebook Solution, America House (Baltimore, MD), 2001.

EDITOR

Asa Briggs, Lord Briggs, English Musical Culture, 1776-1976, University of Cincinnati Press (Cincinnati, OH), 1977.

Mauk Mulder, Managing with Power, Elsevier Focus (Amsterdam, Netherlands), 1979.

Editor of Syzygy: A Journal of Short Fiction, 1976-79; editor of We Have Something to Say: Arts Consortium Review, 1974.

WORK IN PROGRESS: The novels Against the Setting Sun, 2005, and The Blue Pig Solution, 2007.

SIDELIGHTS: In the 1950s Ceil Cleveland and author Larry McMurtry were teenagers and friends in Archer City, a small, dusty west Texas town that later became the real-life setting for the town of Thalia in McMurtry's 1966 novel, The Last Picture Show. The book was made into a 1971 film by Peter Bogdanovich, and actress Cybill Shepherd, in her first role, would become indelibly associated with the work for her portrayal of the cool, daring, blonde, Jacy Farrow. Many residents back in Archer City theorized that Cleveland had been the basis for McMurtry's memorable character, but by then Cleveland had long departed.

After attending college in Spokane, Washington, and earning an M.A. from Wichita Falls' Midwestern University, Cleveland began a long and diversified career, beginning as a Cincinnati newspaper journalist, segueing into arts-foundation administration, and then graduate work at Columbia University. In 1976 she founded Columbia—The Magazine of Columbia University, which won several journalism awards. By the mid-1980s Cleveland had started her own marketing and editorial communications firm, but she continued to write articles for an array of magazines. In 1991 she took a job as vice president for university relations at Queens College in New York City and four years later became an associate professor of English and women's studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, as well as the school's vice president for university affairs. Today she is adjunct professor of English at New York University.

Cleveland left the academic world behind not long after the publication of her autobiographical Whatever Happened to Jacy Farrow? in 1997. In her book Cleveland chose the unorthodox strategy of letting "Jacy" narrate the story of her life, beginning with her high-school days and concluding with Cleveland's commencement address at her Archer City alma mater. "This is one of those currently trendy memories where the reader has to figure what's true and what has been fictionalized," according to reviewer Mike Cox in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, but he termed it "an engaging read, particularly for women who were teenagers in the 1950s and McMurtry fans in general." Entertainment Weekly contributor Don Graham echoed that endorsement, noting that the memoir is noteworthy for revealing "what it was like to grow up female, pretty, and smart" in the era of limited, small-town possibilities.

Cleveland told CA: "When I was a girl in a Texas town of 1,600 on the High Plains, I couldn't wait to get out of there. After traveling all over the world, and living in New York City for twenty years—and especially going through the agony and ecstasy of writing a memoir—I went back to the little town of my girlhood and built the Lonesome Dove Inn as a retreat for writers. I grew up in a town without a library, or anyone except for my mother, who cared about books. Now the town has McMurtry's half million books and a retreat for people who want to read, write, or talk about books. I visit there, but I write better overlooking the lake behind my new home in North Carolina.

"Both the strength and the weakness of my writing career is that I select a variety of subjects and genres to work in: memoir, mystery novel series, stand-alone novel, academic texts, and reference books. I do the novels for fun and the texts for profit; with luck and assiduous application of backside to desk chair, maybe I can move my novels into the second category. Strengths of this variety: I am versatile, have many interests, and can shift voice and style easily. Weakness: I'm hard for publishers to pidgeon-hole."