Billie Travalini

As an unwanted child with lupus, Billie Travalini spent much of her childhood with foster families and in Delaware’s childcare institutions. After serving 11 years on the State Planning Council for Child and Adolescent Mental Health, she works as an educational consultant specializing in troubled youth.

Currently, she also teaches at Lincoln University, at Wilmington University, and in the Boys and Girls Clubs Pegasus ArtWorks program.

She is the author of Bloodsisters, a memoir, which won the Lewis and Clark Discovery Prize and the Delaware Press Association Award for nonfiction.

As a former journalist, she photographed and was the principle writer for Wilmington Senior Center: Fifty Years of Community and co-edited with Fleda Brown, The Mason-Dixon Line: An Anthology of Contemporary Delaware Writers, to be published by the University of Delaware Press, 2008.

She is a fiction editor of The Journal of Caribbean Literatures and has received Individual Artist fellowships in fiction and poetry from the Delaware Division of the Arts.

Titles

Teaching Troubled Youth: A Practical Pedagogical Approach

Quote of the day

There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing poetry.
Emily Dickinson

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.
Ernest Hemingway

The good of a book lies in its being read. A book is made up of signs that speak of other signs, which in their turn speak of things. Without an eye to read them, a book contains signs that produce no concepts; therefore it is dumb.
Umberto Eco

A book is like a man-clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.
John Steinbeck

For books are more than books, they are the life The very heart and core of ages past, The reason why men lived and worked and died, The essence and quintessence of their lives.
Amy Lowell

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.
George Gissing

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.
Thomas Jefferson

There are books...which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there-that of the pulse, the heart beat.
Henry Miller

O, let my books be then the eloquence and dumb presagers of my speaking breast.
William Shakespeare

Authors

Billie Travalini

Titles