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Currently I am Senior Lecturer in the Business School at the University of Central England (UCE) in Birmingham, but don’t let that fool you.
Originally from Pittsburgh, PA, my MBA is from Duquesne University where my thesis was on managing creative people, specifically the work of the editor of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe.
For my Ph.D. I moved to Dublin, Ireland, and researched writers who hung out together: W B Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker and all their friends. I have since turned this unpublished dissertation, ‘Such Friends,’ into an unprofitable industry of multi-media presentations, newsletters, web postings, and late night pub conversations.
In 1998 my Dublin-born partner, Tony Dixon, and I moved to Hollywood, FL, because of a teaching position I couldn’t refuse. In the summer of 2002, we lived two of our dreams: We got married by the beach and then embarked on Semester at Sea, calling in eight European ports, which I chronicled in 'Dixon Donnelly @ Sea' for my local Radio Reading Service. I taught while Tony sat by the pool with the smokers, most of them in bikinis.
At the end of that year, my real job ended, and I taught in Florida, the Bahamas and Saudi Arabia, posted a weekly blog, www.everywednesday.blogspot.com, and then a monthly newsletter, Hands on Creativity, at www.handsoncreativity.blogspot.com. Last summer, after leading the first (and last) ‘Such Friends’ tour to Ireland for the 100th anniversary of the Abbey Theatre and James Joyce’s ‘Bloomsday,’ I interviewed for and was offered my current position at UCE. So last September, during four hurricanes, we packed up the cats and moved to Birmingham, a journey being covered in my third blog, ‘A Yank in Brum.'
Last month we went back on Semester at Sea and brought Tony’s six-year-old granddaughter with us. You can read about our travels to Antwerp, LeHavre, Paris and Dublin in the recent blogs posted on www.gypsyteacher.blogspot.com.