Jocelyn Cullity

I was born in Australia, grew up in Toronto, and now I live in Mobile, Alabama. I am the Director of Creative Writing and the Stokes Center at the University of South Alabama. Living in different places in the world has definitely informed who I am and what I am driven to write about. But I think all of my creative work looks at the absence of women at key historic moments. 

 

When I worked in film and television, I went to China and made a documentary film, Going to the Sea (Women’s Television Network; winner, Lester B. Pearson Award, Canada), about women teachers who were eclipsed by what was then a new market economy. 

 

My first novel, Amah & the Silk-Winged Pigeons, is the result of ten years of research into the lives of Indian and African women who lived in Lucknow, India during 1857. The book is a counterhistory about the women who actually financed and led the “mutiny,” what became a crucial and significant fight against English dominance. The novel has been translated into French and Tamil and won the 2018 Best Book Awards in Historical Fiction. 

 

My second novel, The Envy of Paradise, is also a counter history about Begum Hazrat Mahal, the woman who led the resistance to the English in India. The book was a finalist in Multicultural Fiction for the 2020 International Book Awards. 

 

The setting of The Nurse at Baker Hospital, my third historical novel, takes me much closer to my home in the United States. Told through Della, a poor nurse struggling to get through the Depression on her own, the novel is based on the true story about Norman Baker, a demagogue and radio propagandist who set up a nationally renowned cancer clinic in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. 

 

My short stories, essays, and interviews have been published in the United States, Canada, India, and England in journals such as The Missouri Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, Blackbird, The Kipling Journal, African American Review, and the anthology, Everywhere Stories: Short Fiction from a Small Planet.

~ Jocelyn Cullity