About Kristie

Kristie's first job, at 17, was writing obituaries for the Montgomery County Sentinel in Maryland. This was her introduction to writing biography.

She attended Brown University, where, as editor of the Brown Literary Review, she published the early fiction of Marilynne Robinson (nee Summers). Kristie was the first female managing editor of the Brown Daily Herald. She studied creative writing at Brown with the poet John Berryman.

From 1969 to 1984 Kristie taught English on four continents while serving with her diplomat husband. In 1977 she earned a masters degree from Georgetown University, studying linguistics to teach English as a second language.

From 1981 to 2001 she was a director of the Chicago-based Tribune Company.

Since 1984, Kristie has written a weekly column on women, history and current events for her hometown paper, the NewsTribune of La Salle, Illinois.

In 1992, she published a biography of her grandmother, Ruth Hanna McCormick, with the University of New Mexico Press. Ruth McCormick, a congresswoman from Illinois in 1928, was just one of many women in partisan politics at that time.

The University of New Mexico Press asked Kristie to compile a book of essays on some of these other women. "We Have Come to Stay: American Women and Political parties, 1880-1960," co-edited with Melanie Gustafson and Elisabeth I. Perry, came out in 1999.

The press kindly said that they'd never had editors bring in a project on time, under word count, with everyone still speaking. Kristie, Melanie Gustafson and Pamela Reeves Kilian were invited to edit a Women's Biography Series for the UNM Press. They brought out Pat Schroeder by Joan Lowy in 2003 and Sandra Day O'Connor by Ann McFeatters in 2006.

Kristie has also written more than three dozen free-lance articles and biographical articles for encyclopedias. She says that full-length biographies are like marriages: you'd better really like the person you're with. Articles are more like dating around.

Kristie has two children. William Sanderson Twaddell (Sandy) is a pathologist in New York City. He is married to Dr. Elsye Pine. Ellen Twaddell is a writer and teacher living in Boston.

Kristie and her husband, TL Hawkins, live in McLean, VA, near Washington, DC.

Selected Works

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