Maia Teresa Wojciechowska

From her Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maia_Wojciechowska

Maia Wojciechowska (August 7, 1927 – June 13, 2002) was a Polish-American writer best known for children's and young adult fiction. Her first book and two books for adults were published under her married name Maia Rodman.[1]

Life

Wojciechowska was born in Warsaw, Poland, and schooled in Poland, France, and England. After the 1939 invasion of Poland, the family fled to France where she attended dozens of schools. They moved to California, USA, in 1942.[1]

Wojciechowska married Selden Rodman in 1950 and they had one daughter, Oriana. They divorced in 1957, as did she and her second husband Richard Larkin, 1970–81. For some time in the 1980s–90s she lived in New Jersey with adopted daughter Leonara.[1]

A resident of Mahwah, New Jersey,[2] Wojciechowska died of a stroke at age 74.[3]

Writer

In 1965, her book Shadow of a Bull (1964) won the Newbery Medal recognizing the year's best contribution to American children's literature. It features a Spanish boy destined to be a bullfighter. Its German-language edition won the Deutscher Jugendbuchpreis for youth books in 1968.

Works

• Market Day for Ti Andre (1952), as Maia Rodman[1]
• Shadow of a Bull (1964)
• Odyssey of Courage: The Story of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (New York: Atheneum Books, 1965)
• A Kingdom in a Horse (New York: Harper & Row, 1965)
• Hollywood Kid (1966)
• A Single Light (Harper & Row, 1968)
• Tuned Out (Harper & Row, 1968); Laurel-Leaf edition, ISBN 0-440-99139-0
• Hey, What's Wrong with This One? (Harper & Row, 1969)
• Don't Play Dead Before You Have To: A Novel (Harper & Row, 1970)
• The Rotten Years (New York: Doubleday & Company), 1971
• The Life and Death of a Brave Bull (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich [HBJ], 1972), ISBN 0-15-245200-1
• Till the Break of Day: Memories: 1939-1942 (HBJ, 1972)
• Through the Broken Mirror with Alice: Including parts of Through the Looking-Glass (HBJ, 1972), ISBN 0-15-286950-6
• Winter Tales from Poland (Doubleday, 1973), ISBN 0-385-02839-3
• The People in His Life: A Novel (New York: Stein and Day, 1980), ISBN 0-8128-2717-1
• How God Got Christian into Trouble, (Philadelphia: Westminster Press), 1984, ISBN 0-664-32717-6
• Dreams of Golf (Pebble Beach, CA: Pebble Beach Press, 1993), ISBN 1-883740-01-0
• Dreams of Soccer (Pebble Beach, 1993)
• Dreams of the Super Bowl (Pebble Beach, 1993)[1]

References

• 1. "Maia Wojciechowska Papers". de Grummond Children's Literature Collection. University of Southern Mississippi. Retrieved January 5, 2014.
• 2. McAleavey, Teresa. "One Life – Maia Wojiechowska of Mahwah, Author", The Record (Bergen County), January 7, 1995. Accessed May 16, 2016.
• 3. "Maia Wojciechowska, 74, Author of Children's Books". The New York Times. June 21, 2002.

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From the New York Times on June 21, 2002:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/21/arts/maia-wojciechowska-74-author...

Maia Wojciechowska, 74, Author of Children's Books

Maia Wojciechowska, an award-winning author of children's books, died on June 13 in Long Branch, N.J. She was 74.

The cause was a stroke, said her daughter Oriana Rodman.

Ms. Wojciechowska wrote 19 books, the best-known of which is Shadow of a Bull (1964), about a young boy in Spain who finds his identity after his father, a bullfighter, dies in the ring. The book won the Newbery Medal in 1965.

The book's authenticity came from the author's own experience. Ernest Hemingway acclaimed her as an expert on bullfighting; she managed to get training with fighting bulls and killed one in the ring in Mexico.

Maia Teresa Wojciechowska was born to Zygmunt Wojciechowski and Zofia Wojciechowska in Warsaw on Aug. 7, 1927. When the Nazis invaded Poland at the outbreak of World War II, the family escaped to southern France and later joined her father, a colonel and chief of staff of the Polish Air Force, in England.

After the war, the family moved to Los Angeles. She entered college in 1945 but dropped out after a year. In 1950 she married the author Selden Rodman, who helped her publish her first book, Market Day for Ti André, (1952). Their marriage ended in divorce in 1957. Her second marriage, to Richard Larkin, in 1972, ended in divorce the next year.

In addition to writing, Ms. Wojciechowska was a private detective, a translator for Radio Free Europe, a publicity director for Hawthorn Books and a professional tennis player and instructor. In 1975 she started her own publishing company.

She is survived by

• two daughters,
  • Ms. Rodman, of Santa Fe, N.M., and
  • Leonora Wojciechowska of Garfield, N.J.;
• and two brothers,
  • Zbigniew, of Laguna Hills, Calif., and
  • Christopher Wojciechowski, of Pebble Beach, Calif.