Judith Kirkwood

Judith Kirkwood

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After receiving a Master’s degree with a specialization in poetry from the Creative Writing program at the University of Illinois, Chicago, 50 years ago, Judy Kirkwood was mystified as to how to put that expertise into practice; then realized all writing can, and maybe should, be informed by poetry. A prize-winning author of hundreds of articles on travel, lifestyle, health, personality and business profiles for dozens of magazines and websites, as well as a 45-year veteran editor, ghostwriter and co-author, and book doctor/midwife for both fiction and nonfiction, she is co-author most recently of Please Don’t Cut the Baby! A Nurse’s Memoir (Feb 2024 Lucid House Publishing), with Marilyn Fayre Milos. Judy works closely with Lucid House Publishing as Executive Editor, editing, writing marketing copy, and promoting LHP books, including the Smokey River Suspense Series by Joseph Marshall III, perhaps the country’s most prolific Native (Lakota) writer. Judy has been a speaker on panels at ASJA, an award-winning former member of Society of American Travel Writers and Midwest Travel Writers Association, and intrepid book festival and conference goer. A midwesterner by birth and temperament, Judy resides in Delray Beach, Florida, Madison, Wisconsin, Chicago, Illinois, and Baja California Sur, Mexico. She has returned to her poetry roots with Twirling in a Beam of Light: A Woman’s Life in Poetry (Oct 1, 2024, Lucid House Publishing). 

info Subjects

General

Arts & Culture
Health & Medicine
Lifestyle
Parenting
Religion & Spirituality
Travel
Wellness

Specialties

Memoir, Spirituality, Wellness, Travel and Lifestyle

notepad Skills

  • Advertorials
  • Articles
  • Blog posts
  • Books
  • Communications strategy
  • Content marketing
  • Copywriting
  • Editing
  • Essays
  • Feature writing
  • Ghostwriting
  • Grant writing
  • Op-Ed
  • Profiles
  • Publicity
  • Q&A
  • Social media
  • Web copy

notepad Writing Credits

AARP, American Way, Arthur Frommer’s Budget Travel, Brides, Celebrated Living, Christian Science Monitor, Continental inflight, Country Living, Destination Weddings and Honeymoons, Discover, Distinction, Executive Traveler, Golf for Women, Healing Lifestyles, Hemispheres/United, More, Mothering, National Geographic Traveler, National Wildlife, New Physicians, Reader’s Digest, Simply the Best (contributing writer), Sky/Delta inflight, thirdage.com (contributing writer), eldercarelink.com, huffingtonpost.com, shine.yahoo.com, RD.com (readers digest), Travelandleisure.com, womenswallstreet.com, yourtango.com, dozens of local and regional print and web pubs

notepad Book Credits

Author: Twirling in a Beam of Light: A Woman’s Life in Poetry, 2024

Co-author: Please Don’t Cut the Baby! A Nurse’s Memoir, 2024; Don’t Get Scammed, Get Smart: Seven Simple Steps to Becoming a Savvy Consumer, 2019

Contributor: National Geographic’s Walking New York; NG’s Sacred Places of a Lifetime; NG’s Jouneys of a Lifetime 

Editor: Happenstance, 2024; This Penis Business, 2024; Last Prisoner of Little Bighorn; The Magic Purple Potion, 2024; Sing for the Red Dress, 2024, The Wolf and the Crow, 2024; Rusty and Emma’s Big Shock, 2023; Falling Up in the City of Angles, 2023; Suspension, 2023; A Human Mosaic: Heal, Renew, and Develop Self-Worth, 2019; Addiction on Trial: Tragedy in Downeast Maine, 2013; Uncommon H.O.P.E.: A Powerful Guide to Creating an Extraordinary Life, 2010; The Shadow of Death: Encyclopedia of the United States in the Twentieth Century, 1996;The Holocaust in Lithuania, 1992; and many other books that were ghostwritten, published privately or for limited circulation; and never published. 

 

Selected Work

As author, unless indicated otherwise.

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Twirling in a Beam of Light: A Woman's Life in Poetry

Book, Lucid House PublishingOctober 2024

Fifty years in the making, this book started in the 1970s when I was a writer of poems, having graduated with a Master’s Degree from the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois, Chicago. It wasn’t until the poems for “Twirling in a Beam of Light” were in order that I realized the whole was really a memoir of growing from a girl, safe with her parents, to a girlfriend, wife, mom, work career and the transformation that aging offers. These poems are about joy and loss, grief and celebration, seeing oneself in context as the world changes. The message is you can start over and make a home among strangers, you can open the door to a new beginning, and no matter how many dark nights pass, you can fly through the day on a dust mote twirling in a beam of light. It’s about living fearlessly.

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Please Don't Cut the Baby!

, Lucid House Publishing/Intact AmericaFebruary 2024

This timely book, appearing as it does amid growing bioethical and human rights concerns over non-therapeutic infant male circumcision and genital mutilation in general, is a must-read. Please Don’t Cut the Baby! chronicles Marilyn Milos's journey from an abusive childhood to finding her voice as a social activist participating in the cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s to working as a registered nurse in a small regional hospital, performing her ethical duty to educate parents about what circumcision is before they signed the hospital’s “informed” consent paperwork. Her outrage at the health fallacies promoted by the medical establishment about circumcision, and her compassion for the trauma inflicted on babies (thought to be impervious to pain at that time) led her to become the leading force in questioning the ethics of circumcision and fighting for the rights of infants and children to bodily integrity and genital autonomy.

 

 

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