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