Virginia Knoud Nalencz

Virginia Knoud Nalencz was born in New York City and educated in convent schools by the Ursuline nuns. She received a BA from Manhattanville College, an MA in History from Northwestern University, and an MA in English from Temple University. She claims the ability to diagram most sentences written by Henry James and to arrange in chronological order the principal events in European history from the Magna Carta through the Congress of Vienna. She has been a lab assistant in the physiology department at Hunter College of the City University of New York and a staff writer at the alumni magazine of Temple University in Philadelphia. In Before Times, she published short stories in little magazines that are now extinct.  She has been sustained and inspired by one husband, three sons, and cherished friends; by the name of her daughter-in-law’s business, “A Pickle Story;” by Tom Lehrer’s songs; and by Robert Caro’s dictum to “Turn every page.”