ABOUT
I am a writer, activist, and potter in Urbana, Illinois. I live and work on lands that belonged to the Peoria, Kaskaskia, Peankashaw, Wea, Miami, Mascoutin, Odawa, Sauk, Mesquaki, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Chickasaw Nations. My home was the traditional territory of these Native Nations before they were forcibly removed and the stories of their struggles for survival and identity remain embedded in the land today. I am committed to finding and listening to those stories.
I think of my books as inquiries. Whatever the subject, I ask how it came to be, since the past stays with us in ways we often fail to perceive and understand.
For many years I taught creative nonfiction to undergraduates at the University of Illinois. I am also an old hand at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, a vibrant writing community at the University of Iowa, which has now converted to online.
A longtime ACLU activist, I am past president of my local ACLU chapter and the recipient of two awards from the ACLU. I have also worked with Native and civil rights organizations, including the US Commission on Civil Rights, to urge schools and universities to retire mascots, logos, performances, and team names based on stereotypes of American Indians.
My geographer husband, Tom Bassett, and I have a longstanding relationship with a community in northern Ivory Coast where we first lived in 1981-82. We go back as often as possible so that he can continue his longitudinal research and we can visit our neighbors. We have a house there and are working on building a library.
Most importantly, I am the mother of two grown children with the bonus mother-pleasure of a daughter- and son-in-law.
In her twenties, in the late 1940s, my mother, Christine Cooper Spindel, was the program director of legendary radio station WDIA in Memphis. Her memoir, The Beginnings of Black Radio: My Years at WDIA Memphis, tells the story of a young white woman in a segregated city working in an integrated workplace with stars like Rufus Thomas and B.B.King.
