Author Biography
Jeanette M. Dodge is an award-winning author honored in 2011 with a Moonbeam Children's Book Award, Silver Medal, for her third book, The Key, the Magic Mirror, and the Topaz Ring. Young adult fiction, the book is a trilogy of short stories, a mystery romance, that takes its characters back in time to the Civil War period. The book includes illustrations by the author's daughter, award-winning artist, Mary P. D. Heintzman, of Salem, Oregon. As a poet, the author was honored in 2003 by the International Library of Poetry, named Outstanding Poet of 1994 by the National Library of Poetry, recipient of the Golden Poetry Award of 1992 in the World of Poetry Anthology and the Award of Merit Certificate in 1990. She published her first children's story Seven Cats Named Spot in 2008. Written as an heirloom gift to her children and grandchildren, it is about life with farm pets in the 1950s. In 2009 she published Song of I Am and Other Seasons in Life which pairs a lifetime of poetry with her artist-daughter Mary P. D. Heintzman's award-winning art. Dodge's poetry reflects the influence of the 19th-century Jesuit priest and poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas. Dodge was born in 1921. She is of pioneer stock with great grandparents among the first settlers of St. Charles, Illinois, in 1835. A product of the Great Depression she worked in high school to earn tuition for Cook County School of Nursing and became an R.N. in 1944; as a nurse, she paid her way through University of Illinois where she received a B.S. in journalism in 1949. She married Jay True Dodge in 1948, had her first four children and went back to the U of I, receiving her master's in English in 1962. While raising eight children in Peoria, Illinois, she taught English at Bradley University.
