Mary Sisney

Mary Sisney is a retired English professor, currently living in Claremont, California. She was born and raised in Henderson, Kentucky, during the last years of Jim Crow. At fifteen, she moved to Evanston, Illinois, where she graduated from Evanston Township High School (ETHS) in 1967 and Northwestern University in 1971. It took her only a few weeks of teaching at ETHS to realize that she didn't want to be a high school teacher, so after receiving a Ford Fellowship, she earned her Ph.D. (in 1979) at University of Southern California. Her first tenure-track position was at Tufts University, but she didn't like the Boston area cold weather or the hostile racial climate, so she returned to Southern California, where she taught at Cal Poly Pomona for twenty-nine years. After retiring in 2009, Sisney wrote and published her memoir, A REDLIGHT WOMAN WHO KNOWS HOW TO SING THE BLUES: MY LIFE IN WHITE INSTITUTIONS, which was named one of Kirkus Reviews' Best Indie Real Stories of 2013. Her second book, a humorous, common sense advice book called THE BRONZE RULE: HOW I LIVE MY LIFE AND LET OTHER PEOPLE LIVE THEIRS, was published in April, 2014.