Grace Woodbridge Roys suffered from bi-polar disease before it was well understood. Her daughter feared that her children would also suffer mental illness. This annotation of Grace's diary opens the early 1900s missionary world in China and the personality of Grace to the reader. In December 1910 Grace married Harvey Curtis Roys, who was teaching physics at Kiang Nan government school in Nanking, under the sponsorship of the YMCA. Grace had had a mental breakdown weeks earlier when her missionary father forbade the marriage. The diary records their early married life, the births of their first two children, their social life with other missionaries in China, many of whom made major contributions to Nanking life and education: medical doctors and nurses, theology professors, agricultural innovators, and founders of universities, hospitals, nursing schools, and schools for young Chinese women and men. Included is their experience evacuating during the Sun Yat-sen Revolution of 1911. Well-known missionaries of that time came to tea and taught at the Hillcrest School that the mothers began for foreign children. The Nanyang Exposition took place in 1910, too, as China was in the throes of entering the modern era, with trains, electricity, telegraphs, and a new interest in democracy.
For over forty years Judy Hogan has taught creative writing in libraries, colleges, and independently. She has published six mystery novels, six volumes of poetry, two non-fiction works, individual poems, and book reviews. She lives, farms, and writes in Moncure, North Carolina. She was chair (1975-78) of COSMEP, the national small press association, and led the North Carolina Writers Network (1983-87). She founded and edited Carolina Wren Press (1976-91). Locally she's an environmental activist.
Judy Hogan was co-editor of a poetry journal,
Hyperion, from 1970 to 1981. In 1976 she founded Carolina Wren Press. She has been active in central North Carolina as a reviewer, book distributor, publisher, teacher, and writing consultant.
Her newest publication is
Grace: A China Diary, 1910-16, which she edited and annotated, and
Political Peaches; The Fifth Penny Weaver Mystery. Six other mystery novels,
Killer Frost (2012),
Farm Fresh and Fatal (2013)
The Sands of Gower (2015),
Haw, Nuclear Apples? and
Formaldehyde, Rooster (2016) are in print. She has published six volumes of poetry with small presses, including,
Beaver Soul (2013) and
This River: An Epic Poem (2014). Her other published prose is
Watering the Roots in a Democracy (1989) and
The PMZ Poor Woman's Cookbook (2000). Her papers and twenty-five years of extensive diaries are in the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture, Duke University. She has taught creative writing since 1974 and Freshman English from 2004 to 2007 at St. Augustine's College in Raleigh.
Between 1990 and 2007 she visited Kostroma, Russia, five times, teaching American literature at Kostroma University in 1995 and giving a paper to a Kostroma University Literature Conference in March 2007. A second paper was published in the 2013 Literature Conference proceedings at Kostroma University. She worked on five exchange visits, as well as cooperative publishing with Kostroma writers and exhibits of their artists. Judy lives and farms in Moncure, North Carolina, near Jordan Lake.
