Event – Detail

Locale is vital to all narratives. As important as human behavior and historical context, place creates, alters and necessitates plot lines. Making history come alive is a thrilling adventure of research, world-building and deep dives into differing eras.

In this 3-hour workshop, we’ll explore research tools and visual prompts to craft unique stories that are fully place-centric and invite readers to enter and explore historical settings. If you have a work in progress, you’re welcome to continue expanding its setting or settings.

Cordelia Frances Biddle is a feminist and historian. Her newest novel, I Remember You, connects eras within Philadelphia’s rich and turbulent history (pub date May, 2027). Her book Listen to Me: The Women of the Bible Speak Out is a vivid retelling of patriarchal sacred texts. She's now adapting the work for the stage. The River Was Waiting is Part II in the Gorne Trilogy - following They Believed They Were Safe. Both novels focus on the aftermath of trauma. Prior fictions include the books Sins of Commission, The Actress, Without Fear, Deception’s Daughter, and The Conjurer. These novels are set during the early Victorian era in Philadelphia and explore women’s issues, and the chasm between wealth and poverty. Her first novel, Beneath the Wind, examined one woman's plight during the Edwardian Age. Her nonfiction books include Biddle, Jackson, and a Nation in Turmoil and Saint Katharine: The Life of Katharine Drexel.​ As a journalist, she has written for Town and Country, Hemispheres and W, and won the 1997 SATW Lowell Thomas travel-writing award for "Three Perfect Days in Philadelphia." Her interpretive tour for Ebenezer Maxwell Mansion won the Historical Society of Pennsylvania’s 2013 Education and Public Programs Award. She was a contributing writer to the film Philadelphia: The Great Experiment.​ Cordelia teaches creative writing at Drexel University’s Pennoni Honors College. She won the Honors College Teaching Excellence Prize in 2012, and The Adjunct Faculty Award in 2021. She has also taught creative writing classes at the University of the Arts, and at Temple University Center City, as well as one-day seminars with Mystery Writers of America.

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