Readings for Writers

Born in Belgium, the daughter of an American minister, Jo Ray McCuen-Metherell had moved from Brussels to Paris to Bern, Switzerland, by the time she was seven years old. In Bern, she attended the Freies Gymnasium and spoke not only fluent French and German but also English, which was the language spoken to her by her American parents. After World War II, Dr. McCuen-Metherell's parents sent her and her brother to Pacific Union College (in California's Napa Valley), where she received a B. A. in English. She taught English and French in high school for several years and then took night classes at the University of Southern California, where she earned an M.A. and Ph.D. While working on her doctorate, she was hired to teach English at Glendale Community College and later to serve as Dean of the Evening College. A chance meeting in 1973 with Anthony C. Winkler, a successful novelist, led to a literary partnership that has produced 15 co-authored textbooks used at colleges and universities across the United States.

Born in Kingston, Jamaica, West Indies, Anthony C. Winkler was educated in Jamaica at Excelsior College, Mount Alvernia Academy and Cornwall College, the last two being in Montego Bay. He was also educated at Citrus Community College, Glendora, California. Winkler taught briefly at Pasadena City College and for a year at Moneague Teachers College in Saint Anne, Jamaica, an experience chronicled in "Going Home to Teach" (1995). From 1968 to 1975 Winkler had sales territories as a bookman for Appleton Century Crofts textbook publishers, and later for Scott, Foresman. In 1969, he decided he could write textbooks as well as anyone. Through a chance meeting with the sales representative of another company, he submitted the manuscript, "Poetry as System," and was offered a contract for its publication. Eventually, he met Jo Ray McCuen-Metherell and the two became textbook writers and collaborators. Over the years, they have produced more than a dozen textbooks, most on rhetoric and writing. In addition to Winkler's textbooks, his body of work includes, among other books: "The Painted Canoe" (novel, 1983); "The Lunatic" (novel, 1987); "The Great Yacht Race" (novel, 1992); "Dog War" (novel, 2006); "Trust the Darkness: My Life as a Writer" (autobiography, 2008); "The Burglary" (play, premiered in Toronto in 2005); "The Lunatic" (movie, filmed in 1991); "The Annihilation of Fish" (movie, 1999) and "Bob Marley, an Intimate Portrait by His Mother" (biography, 1996, with Cedella Booker).