About
Cornelia Maude Spelman, MSW, was a therapist with children and families before turning full-time to writing and art. She’s written eleven books for children that help them manage emotion and difficult life situations. Her The Way I Feel series of books for young children, described by reviewers as “sensitive” and “compassionate,” have sold over four million copies and been translated into Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Greek, Japanese, German, Arabic, Turkish, Danish, Russian, and Portuguese. She is also the author of the best-selling Your Body Belongs to You.
Her twelfth children’s book, A Foot Is Not a Fish! is about what is true, and helps children’s critical thinking skills while playfully illustrating the difference between facts and opinions or wishes.
Cornelia’s first memoir, MISSING (paperback 2022) about her family’s emotional legacies, has been called “memoir writing at its absolute finest.” (Alex Kotlowitz, author, There Are No Children Here)
SOLACE, her second memoir (Oct.15, 2024) is about the healing that occurs from human connection–how telling and listening, asking for help, and giving help, bring about comfort and recovery from addiction, grief, and sorrows.
Cornelia has earned awards from the Illinois Arts Council, was a finalist for the Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction award from Salem College, and was awarded the Bernard De Voto Fellowship in Nonfiction at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. A daily diary writer, Cornelia is currently writing Volume 269. Her diaries, those of her mother, and papers of her grandmother and great-grandmother are archived at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Harvard University. (“The library’s manuscript collections and books document women’s lives and women’s issues currently and retrospectively. Especially well represented are suffrage and women’s rights, social reform, family history, health and sexuality, work and professions, culinary history, and gender issues.” Schlesinger Library’s description of itself) Cornelia is the mother of a son and daughter and a grandmother of four. She lives with her husband, Reginald Gibbons, in Evanston, Illinois.