Kristie Miller, author, biographer, editor

Last year, Kristie Miller and Robert H. McGinnis published A Volume of Friendship: The Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and Isabella Greenway, 1904-1953. The book contains more than two hundred letters between the first lady and the Arizona congresswoman that chronicle the transformation of two young society women into pragmatic political leaders.

Kristie published a full-length biography, Isabella Greenway: An Enterprising Woman, in 2004. Greenway married three times, and was at various times a rancher, US Representative, and founder of the legendary Arizona Inn. The book won the Willa Award (Women Writing the West) and was a finalist for the Spur Award (Western Writers of America) in 2005. It was also a 2004 Southwest Book of the Year. It is available in hard cover and paperback.

Up next: Ellen and Edith: Woodrow Wilson’s First Ladies, scheduled to be published in October 2010. The Wilson women were strikingly different from each other. Ellen Axson Wilson, quiet and intellectual, died after just a year and a half in the White House and is thought to have had little impact on history. Edith Bolling Wilson, who assumed many of the executive functions after her husband suffered a stroke, was flamboyant and confident but left a legacy of controversy. Yet each played a significant role in the White House.

Kristie’s first book, Ruth Hanna McCormick, (1992) told the story of a congresswoman who represented the entire state of Illinois in 1928, and later became Thomas Dewey’s campaign manager. (She was also Kristie’s grandmother.) The book won the Chicago Friends of Literature Vicki Penziner Matson Award and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography.

Ruth McCormick was just one of many women in partisan politics at that time. Kristie, Melanie Guustafson and Elisabeth I. Perry edited a book of essays, We Have Come to Stay: American Women and Political Parties, 1880-1960 (1999). Kristie currently edits the American Women’s Biography Series for the University of New Mexico Press.

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's introduction to writing biography came with her first job, at 17, writing obituaries for the Montgomery County Sentinel in Rockville, Maryland.

She attended Brown University. As editor of the Brown Literary Review, she published the early fiction of Marilynne Robinson (neé 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 Tribune Company.

For a quarter of a century, from 1984 to 2009, Kristie wrote a weekly column on women, history and current events for her hometown paper, the NewsTribune of La Salle, Illinois.

Kristie has two grown children and a grandchild. She and her husband, TL Hawkins, live in McLean, VA, near Washington, DC.

"WE ARE HERE TO HELP YOU, AND WE HAVE COME TO STAY!" In 1892, Judith Ellen Foster addressed these words to the men assembled for the Republican National Convention. But the participation by Foster and other women in party politics during the next 80 years has been largely forgotten. For the last two decades, Kristie Miller has been working to write women back into history. She is especially interested in women's participation in politics. First, women had to win the vote. The men had it easy - they could fight for the right to vote. Women had to persuade those in power to surrender half of their authority - in some ways a harder task. After women won the vote, they had to overcome prejudice, apathy, and the old boys' network to gain a place in the councils of government. Hillary Clinton, Condoleeza Rice, and Sandra Day O'Connor are all standing on the shoulders of these giants. Kristie has been writing some of their stories.

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. Mother Jones by Simon Cordery is expected to come out in the spring of 2010.

Kristie's first job, at 17, was writing obituaries for the Montgomery County Sentinel in Maryland. It 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 (neé 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 1981 to 2001 she was a director of the Chicago Tribune Company.

For a quarter of a century, from 1984 to 2009, Kristie wrote a weekly column on women, history and current events for her hometown paper, the NewsTribune of La Salle, Illinois.

Kristie has two grown children and one grandchild. She and her husband, TL Hawkins, live in McLean, VA, near Washington, DC.