Valerie studied writing at the New School, received a B.S. in literature, summa cum laude, from the State University of New York in 1987 and once had a job answering Doctor Seuss’ mail. Her first novel, "St. Ursula's Girls Against the Atomic Bomb," was published in hardcover by MacAdam/Cage and in paperback by Penguin. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Sun, New Letters, the Indiana Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Missouri Review, Rosebud , The Iowa Review and other magazines. She was a DeWitt Wallace/Readers Digest fellow at MacDowell, and her essays have been awarded “Most Notable” five times in The Best American Essays. “Jasmine Washing the Hair of Pearsa” won first prize both in the Indiana Review and Robert Olen Butler Fiction Contests. For seven years, she drove an ambulance along the back-country roads of Vermont where she lived with the playwright John Kern, her kind, funny and wonderful partner, who died in 2022. Their beloved daughter Mara died of a brain tumor at the age of twelve. Valerie now lives in Toronto, near a dream of a daughter and daughter-in-law and two wise and funny twin grandsons, Jasper and Grady. She recently attended the Pride parade at their elementary school—the entire school marching through the streets of Toronto, waving rainbow flags. In the words of Taylor Branch: “Wondrous things are happening fast at the fringes of the impossible.”
Personal Statement:
Childhood in the 1950s, complicated by a brainwashing by the nuns and a world that was all white and Christian all the time, left plenty for me to wonder about, especially since I had read about the Trail of Tears and knew two of my great-grandmothers were native people. (Columbus didn’t discover America? He came looking for gold? And we weren’t, as we recited each day in the Pledge of Allegiance, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all?)
Many of us are bewildered by these tumultuous times, but this society is saner and kinder and more inclusive than the one I grew up in when the Cold War was on and black people were being lynched in this country. Millions of Americans could not vote. Native people had been pushed off their land. Homosexuals remained in the closet. Now I find it comforting to know that cultural evolution is much speedier than genetic evolution, and I (and my characters) continue to dream of a world where human creativity prevails over tribalism, war and greed—a new world built in the shell of the old. Human beings have designed the cruelly unequal society we live in; human beings can re-design it.