Out of the Ordinary

Out of the Ordinary:
Reflections On Growing Up With Gay Parents

Due in Bookstores Everywhere, July 2000

Editors, Noelle Howey and Ellen Samuels

To be published by St. Martin's Press, 2000.

Biographies of the Editors
About the Preface
About the Forward
Schedule a Reading/Event with the Editors and Contributors
Other Links

Biographies of the Editors

Noelle Howey

Noelle Howey is a freelance writer based in Manhattan. Since 1996, she has written news features, articles and personal essays for magazines including Jane, Ms., Mademoiselle, Glamour, Teen People, Brooklyn Bridge and others. Her essay, "A Daughter's Story," (Seventeen, May 1997) was one of five final nominees for Outstanding Magazine Article in the 1998 Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) Media Awards. Two essays have also been published, respectively, in Drs. Leonard and JoAnne Podis' books Rethinking Writing (Allyn & Bacon, 1995) and Working With Student Writers (Peter Lang, 1998).

Prior to arriving in New York, Noelle worked her way up from an intern to an assistant news reporter at National Public Radio in Cleveland, where she reported, wrote and voiced over thirty on-air segments and produced numerous roundtables. While in Cleveland, she also wrote book reviews and articles for the alternative weekly, Cleveland Free Times. That same weekly awarded her short story, "Idiot Savant," with Second Place in their City-Wide Fiction Contest. Noelle graduated from Oberlin College in 1994 with Phi Beta Kappa honors, having received three writing-related fellowships while a Creative Writing/English double major there.

Since Noelle's father came out, she has been actively involved in both the gay/lesbian and the transgender communities. She has volunteered as an AIDS home care worker and participated in numerous pro-gay rights groups. She is currently developing a proposal for a memoir about her family's struggle with, and ultimate acceptance of, her father's transsexualism.

Ellen Samuels

Ellen Samuels is a writer and teacher who lives in Boston. She has published poetry and articles in many literary journals and magazines, including The American Voice, The Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lesbian Review of Books, Sojourner, Kalliope, and The Journal of Lesbian Studies, and in several anthologies. She has received grants from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts and the Feminist Women's Writing Workshops, and was a 1997 finalist for the Astraea Foundation's Emerging Lesbian Writer award. In 1996, Ellen earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Cornell University, where she also served as assistant editor of the literary journal, Epoch, and received the Corson-Bishop Prize in Poetry and the Robert Chasen Memorial Prize in Poetry. She subsequently held a 1996-97 lectureship in English at Cornell University, and served on the Dean's Advisory Committee on Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Studies. She graduated from Oberlin College in 1994 with Phi Beta Kappa, High Honors in English, and the Dudley Tenney Prize for English.

Ellen has worked in women's health and sexuality education and advocacy for a number of years, including serving as chair of Oberlin Students United for Reproductive Freedom, vice-president of the Ithaca Breast Cancer Alliance, and as a clinic volunteer. She currently teaches the Writing Workshops for Women and plans poetry events for New Words Bookstore in Cambridge, MA. She is working on a memoir about her mother's death from breast and ovarian cancer.

About The Preface

Dan Savage, noted gay writer and author of "The Kid: What Happened When my Boyfriend and I Decided to Go Get Pregnant", has written a preface for the anthology which combines his usual biting wit with a serious consideration of how gay parenting has changed over the generations.

About The Foreward

Margarethe "Grethe" Cammermeyer is writing a foreword for the anthology. Cammermeyer rose to national attention in 1993 when she, as a colonel in the Army National Guard, was the highest-ranking military officer ever discharged for homosexuality. She fought her discharge in a lawsuit and wrote a book about the experience, Serving in Silence, which was made into a movie produced by Barbra Streisand and starring Glenn Close. In 1998, Cammermeyer ran for Congress in her home district in Washington state and was narrowly defeated by the Republican incumbent. She is a mother (of two sons) and a grandmother, and was outspoken in her campaign about her experience as a lesbian parent.

Schedule a Reading/Event with the Editors and Contributors

To schedule a reading or related event at your bookstore, school, university, or club, please contact Noelle Howey or Ellen Samuels.