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WelcomeMildred Barger Herschler was born in a large brick house with an upper porch and bay windows in the northern panhandle of West Virginia. By the time she was twelve, it was generally accepted by her family that she would be a writer. She became a reporter and staff writer at a daily newspaper, the Moundsville Journal, then attended Bethany College, WV, majoring in Journalism. Herschler wrote her first book, a children’s biography, Frederick Douglass (Follett Publishing Company, Chicago, 1969) while living in Huntington, Long Island, New York, with her husband and three children. Several of her poems were at that time published in The Crisis, the NAACP magazine. Later on, she worked as an editor for The Research Institute of America, NYC, and then editor of The Sales Executive, for the Sales Executives Club of New York. She left that position to work full-time on her first novel, The Walk Into Morning (Tor, New York, 1993). She moved to South Carolina in 1988. She had written the novel mostly on a typewriter. When an interviewer told her she would “save years” if she had a computer, she purchased her first MacIntosh. (Now she wonders where the years she saved went.) She remembers with delight her association with her esteemed editor Harriet P. McDougal. She was awarded a glorious month at the Millay Colony for the Arts in Austerlitz, NY in 1993, where she worked on her first young adult novel, The Darkest Corner (Front Street, an imprint of Boyds Mill Press, Inc., Honesdale, PA, 2000). Her short story Martin’s Epiphany was a winner in the South Carolina Fiction Project in 1996. She continues to work in her home in Landrum, SC, at present writing short stories and poetry. |
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