Celestine sibley biography examples
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By Maria Saporta
I had never appreciated the reporting skiva of Celestine Sibley until I became her target.
As a budding journalist at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, inom had long admired the homespun writing talents of Sibley – her ability to tell heartfelt tales of the ordinary man or woman, bringing them alive with extraordinary stories bridging our humanity.
The Atlanta Press Club inducted the late Celestine Sibley into its entré of Fame on Friday, Nov. 7 along with NBC’s Tom Brokaw, WXIA’s Brenda Wood and Claude Sitton, who covered the civil rights movement for the New York Times out of Atlanta during the 1960s.
The night brought back so many memories of Celestine Sibley, a mentor to me and so many others at the newspaper with her generosity of spirit.
One of my most vivid memories was in 1991 when I became the newspaper’s first woman business columnist.
I had been asked to speak to the Kiwanis Club of Atlanta in mid-year. And because Celestine Sibley was a member, she
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Occasionally, books are published in the U. S. that can best be described as “oddities” which acquire a kind of cult following. Their popularity has little to do with literary merit, even though they frequently have much to say about social and cultural matters. Essentially, they appeal to our fascination with the bizarre, morbid and extraordinary.
Some notable examples are: In Advance of the Landing by Douglas Curran (extraordinary photographs and interviews with people who believe that an alien invasion is imminent); and Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip (a bizarre photographic journey which depicts the impact of the Depression on Wisconsin’s rural farm life). Oracle of the Ages is a biography of Georgia “witch and fortune-teller,” Mayhayley Lancaster, who died in 1955.
According to the author, Dot Moore, there are a significant (though dwindling) number of people who not only remember Mayhayley but are willing to talk about the tall, thin woman with one eye who lived in a Hea
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A Plague of Bulldozers: Celestine Sibley and Suburban Sprawl
The Country of Mystery
Sibley published her first murder mystery, The Malignant Heart, in 1958, but did not return to the genre until thirty-three years later. In this novel, she introduces readers to Katherine (Kate) Kincaid, a young reporter for the Atlanta Searchlight and an amateur sleuth who lives with her father, a retired policeman. Kate appears to be one of the few female news reporters on staff; most of the other women staffers work in the "Casserole and Camisole Department," writing, as most newspaperwomen did at that time, about fashion, food, gardens, club activities, and high society.
Resembling Sibley, the fictional Kate "wrote a column a few days a week, covered an occasional story. . . and was available as a kind of office memory for youngsters who knew nothing about Atlanta's or the newspaper's past." When we meet her again in Ah, Sweet Mystery (1991), the widowed Kate Mulcay lives in nort