It happened at night around fires in the backyard, it happened in
bright sunshine on top of boulders in the Long Island Sound, and sometimes it even
happened during spooky visits to the graveyard at the William Floyd Estate in Mastic
Beach. Wherever and whenever, when Josephine Nobisso was a child, it was to her that
cousins and friends looked to come up with appropriate stories and even with rhyming songs
to the accompaniment of her guitar. All this was good practice for Josephine’s dream:
that of becoming a children’s book author. Her first story for children appeared in a
national magazine when she was 18. “Beginner’s luck,” she says, because
even though she kept writing children’s stories, it was another ten years before her
first children’s book was released. By that time she had published 3 pseudonymous
novels for adults, but many of the manuscripts that Joi (a spelling one of her cousins
created, and which is pronounced “Joey”) created in the meantime would later be
published by Simon & Schuster, Scholastic/Orchard, Houghton Mifflin, Winslow House,
Rizzoli International, Berkeley Jove (Putnam), Mondo, Pauline Books & Media, The Green
Tiger Press, Unibooks Korea, and her own press, Gingerbread House.
Josephine was born on February 9, 1953, in the Bronx, and was raised
in the Arthur Avenue section called “Little Italy.” She attended St. Martin of Tours School through
fourth grade. When her family finally moved full time to their country house in Mastic
Beach on Long Island, she spent two hours of every school day riding a bus to and from
Riverhead, where she attended St. John the Evangelist school through eight grade, and then
Mercy High School for two years. It is to the
education Josephine received in these schools that she feels she owes the debt of her
writing career. As she so humorously conveys in IN ENGLISH, OF COURSE, she had trouble with the English language in school. “But by
the time I was out of sixth grade,” Josephine says, “the nuns had kindly and
patiently taught me everything I would need to know about grammar.” Now a mother who homeschooled her
daughter, Gingerbread House’s
Art Director Maria Nicotra, Ms. Nobisso and her family live on the
East End of Long Island, in the little hamlet of Quiogue.
Ms. Nobisso regularly publishes articles about writing, and her
greatest authorial pride lies in having been acknowledged in 6 books by fellow writers.
Each year, to consistently rave evaluations, she conducts about 100 writing workshops in
"The Nobisso Recommendations: Guiding Students to Write in Their Authentic
Voices,” © part of which comes to life in her
visionary book, SHOW DON'T TELL!, SECRETS OF WRITING. She visits an average of two
schools and libraries per week to present her highly visual assembly program, "An
Encounter with the Author," and she often conducts
staff development workshops, and speaks at commencements, college courses, and conferences
in the USA and abroad. She has presented at several universities, and is frequent and
favorite subject of the media. Ms. Nobisso received teaching certification from SUNY New
Paltz, but she spent only three semesters there, completing her studies of languages at
the Universita’ di Urbino in Italy. She still travels extensively in the European
countries, and lived in both Italy and Austria for periods at a time.
In 2000, The National Catholic Educational Association named
Josephine Nobisso a "Distinguished Graduate," and in 1991 Delta Kappa Gamma—the
international society of honored teachers— named her "FRIEND OF EDUCATION"
for "someone not eligible for membership in the Society, but rather outside the
profession who has worked significantly toward improving the educational opportunities of
others, and who has given outstanding service to promoting quality education."
Ms. Nobisso has been a long-standing member of The Author’s
Guild and the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, and was the
co-founder of the Long Island Children’s Writers and Illustrators group. For some
years, she served as an officer of the Westhampton Writers Festival, facilitating gala to
honor living literary legends. In 2004, Ms. Nobisso was appointed to a two-year term on
the American Library Association-Children’s Book Council joint committee.
The past few years have seen many honors for Josephine
Nobisso. Besides her Gingerbread House books' many citations (as outlined on our About Us
page), Ms. Nobisso's books with other publishers have not gone uncelebrated. For instance, in 2001, her non-fiction picture
book from Houghton Mifflin, JOHN BLAIR AND THE GREAT HINKLEY FIRE--the heretofore
untold story of the African-American ex-slave who saved the lives of 300 Caucasian people
during the worst firestorm in United States history--received six prestigious citations,
among them the "Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People," and the
"Northeast Minnesota Book of the Year" Award. Her books have earned many other
significant awards, among them The International Reading Association-Children’s Book
Council’s “Children’s Choices” twice, Learning Magazine’s
Teachers’ Choice, a Recommended Parents’ Choice, a place on Bank Street College
of Education’s “Best Books of the Year" list, a NAPPA, an IPPY, the
Catholic Press Association Award, a Storyteller World Award, the Parent Council’s
“Outstanding” citation, Parents’ Magazine “Best Books of the
Year” citation, and her books have been named to the Cooperative Children's Book
Center Choices list and The Kansas-National Education Association Reading Circle. Several
of Ms. Nobisso's titles have been named to ABA’s Book Sense 76 (The Picks List,) and
to the Association of Booksellers for Children’s “Best Books of the Year”
list.
When the author received the
"Distinguished Graduate Award" from the NCEA, her elementary alma mater St.
John the Evangelist hosted the ceremony in the very auditorium in which that school had
given her a surprise award, that of "General Excellence," thirty years
earlier, when she was graduating from eighth grade. After that eighth grade award,
when Josephine was a senior in high school, another surprise award had come. As she was
scurrying through the lobby of William Floyd High School, from which she graduated in
1971, she stopped to make sense of something familiar. Her name, in thick, spanking white
letters was being painted onto the school's first awards board. The category on which the
painter atop a ladder was writing the future author's name? "Excellence in
English." Why would these honors come as "surprises"?
Josephine came from a family of immigrants in which Italian was the first language. Except
for help in the universal languages and of arithmetic and music, her parents could not
assist her in her schoolwork. Everyone in her neighborhood--"the butcher, the
baker, the ravioli maker," she tells in In English, of Course—seemed to speak
Italian. Since no English-as-a-Second-Language programs existed in schools during those
years after World War II, children of every nationality were grouped together--up to 50 in
each class--to learn right along with the American children.
To add to her early
difficulties with the English language, Josephine's parents brought her to Italy every
year for extended visits during which she sometimes missed months of school. Her parents
wanted her and her sister to practice their new tongue, the result being that the parents
spoke Italian to their daughters, who answered in broken English. Because Josephine's
parents could read neither English nor Italian well enough to keep books in their small
apartment, the future author owned only three children's books of her own as a child--all
Golden Books, and all gifts. So how did Josephine Nobisso become the English-language
author of award-winning books for both children and adults and how did she come to develop
copyrighted writing method that has been enjoying robust success for almost twenty years?
"Many of my
childhood adult acquaintances may have been functionally illiterate, but I never paid
that any mind. I only knew that they were great and expressive story-tellers. Our little
apartment became a teeming banquet hall on Sundays, and the stopping-over spot for my
parents' friends and relatives who were waiting for ships to distant ports in South
America and Europe. I remember never having to go to bed early on nights when we had
visitors, and I remember being mesmerized and transported by the marvelous stories I
heard. That sense of intimacy, of confidence through sharing is the
sense I am trying to capture when I write my own stories. And hardly a day goes by that I
don't meet someone else who wants to write. We love--therefore we all must tell
stories!”
