Clarissa Pinkola Estés Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Clarissa Pinkola Estés, born January 27, 1945.

Clarissa Pinkola Estés is an American writer and Jungian psychoanalyst. She is the author of Women Who Run with the Wolves, which remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 145 weeks and has sold over two million copies.

Estés was born in Gary, Indiana, to Emilio Maria Reyés and Cepción Ixtiz, who were from Mexico. She is a certified senior Jungian analyst. She earned her doctorate, from the Union Institute & University, in ethno-clinical psychology on the study of social and psychological patterns in cultural and tribal groups. She is the author of many books on the journey of the soul.

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Nick Flynn Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Nick Flynn, born January 26, 1960.

Nick Flynn is an American writer, playwright, and poet.

He was raised by his mother in Scituate, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston.

Flynn had no contact with his father throughout most of his childhood and adolescence as his parents separated when he was six months old. As a child, he was discouraged from pursuing a writing career because his father had identified himself as a writer to his mother when they first met. Flynn claims that, along with his father’s alcoholism, a reason for his parents’ separation was his father’s “delusion of greatness” directly connected to his being an artist. Flynn first became an electrician instead of a writer after graduating high school, because of the stigma associated with the latter.

At 20, he was offered a scholarship to study English at University of Massachusetts Amherst. He studied with Fred Robinson, who was then married to Marilyn Robinson—she would sometimes teach his classes. It was at UMass that Flynn was first exposed to contemporary poetry, in a workshop taught by James Tate.

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Gloria Naylor Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Gloria Naylor, born January, 25, 1950.

Gloria Naylor was an American novelist, known for novels including The Women of Brewster Place, Linden Hills and Mama Day.

Naylor was born in New York on January 25, 1950, the oldest child of Roosevelt Naylor and Alberta McAlpin. The Naylors, who had been sharecroppers in Robinsonville, Mississippi, had migrated to Harlem to escape life in the segregated South and seek new opportunities in New York City. Her father became a transit worker; her mother, a telephone operator. Even though Naylor’s mother had little education, she loved to read, and encouraged her daughter to read and keep a journal. Before her teen years, Gloria began writing prodigiously, filling many notebooks with observations, poems, and short stories

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Edith Wharton Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Edith Wharton, born January 24, 1862.

Edith Wharton was an American writer and designer. Wharton drew upon her insider’s knowledge of the upper-class New York “aristocracy” to portray realistically the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, for her novel The Age of Innocence. She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1996. Among her other well known works are The House of Mirth, the novella Ethan Frome, and several notable ghost stories.

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Cathy Hopkins Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Cathy Hopkins, born January 23, 1953.

Cathy Hopkins is an English writer with over 70 published titles. She has written for fiction for children, teens and adults.

Hopkins was born in Manchester, but lived in Kenya from the age of five until she was eleven and her family returned to England. She also sang with a rock and roll band named Driving Rock and the Rockettes, which toured local colleges and universities as the warm-up band to groups such as Wizard and The Average White Band.

Her late father wrote under the name Billy Hopkins. His titles include Our Kid, Kate’s Story, High Hopes, Going Places, Anything Goes, Whatever Next, Tommy’s World and Big Mama.

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Francis Bacon Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Francis Bacon, born January 22, 1561.

Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban, also known as Lord Verulam, was an English philosopher and statesman who served as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England under King James I. Bacon led the advancement of both natural philosophy and the scientific method and his works remained influential even in the late stages of the Scientific Revolution.

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Eva Ibbotson Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Eva Ibbotson, born January 21, 1925.

Eva Maria Charlotte Michelle Ibbotson was a British novelist born in Austria to a Jewish family who fled the Nazis. She is known for her children’s literature. Some of her novels for adults have been reissued for the young adult market. The historical novel Journey to the River Sea won her the Smarties Prize in category 9–11 years, garnered an unusual commendation as runner-up for the Guardian Prize, and made the Carnegie, Whitbread, and Blue Peter shortlists. She was a finalist for the 2010 Guardian Prize at the time of her death. Her last book, The Abominables, was among four finalists for the same award in 2012

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Johannes V. Jensen Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Johannes V. Jensen, born January 20, 1873.

Johannes Vilhelm Jensen was a Danish author, known as one of the great Danish writers of the first half of 20th century. He was awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize in Literature “for the rare strength and fertility of his poetic imagination with which is combined an intellectual curiosity of wide scope and a bold, freshly creative style”. One of his sisters, Thit Jensen, was also a well-known writer and a very vocal, and occasionally controversial, early feminist.

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Eden Robinson Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to Eden Robinson, born January 19, 1968.

Eden Victoria Lena Robinson is an Indigenous Canadian author. She is a member of the Haisla and Heiltsuk First Nations.

Born in Kitamaat, British Columbia, she is a member of the Haisla and Heiltsuk First Nations. Her sister, Carla Robinson, is a television journalist for CBC Newsworld.

She received a BA from the University of Victoria and an MFA from the University of British Columbia.

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A.A. Milne Biobite

Today’s Happy Birthday shout out goes to A.A. Milne, born January 18, 1882.

Alan Alexander Milne was an English writer best known for his books about the teddy bear Winnie-the-Pooh, as well as for children’s poetry. Milne was primarily a playwright before the huge success of Winnie-the-Pooh overshadowed all his previous work. Milne served in both World Wars, as a lieutenant in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment in the First World War and as a captain in the Home Guard in the Second World War.

Milne was the father of bookseller Christopher Robin Milne, upon whom the character Christopher Robin is based. It was during a visit to London Zoo, where Christopher became enamoured with the tame and amiable bear Winnipeg, that Milne was inspired to write the story of Winnie-the-Pooh for his son. Milne bequeathed the original manuscripts of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories to the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge, his alma mater.

To read more, go to Wikipedia.

To check out “Poems in the Key of Carlin,” or to see what else Curious Penman has to offer, check out our Browse Books page.