Cody Collett (born Patricia Marie Cody) is descended from generations of proud but impoverished ancestors whose undervalued struggles to survive nevertheless enhanced the lives of those within their communities and beyond. They picked fruit, street-peddled cloth, dug graves, swept streets, cleaned houses, painted and hung wallpaper, worked in laundries and, in wartime, as cavalry and infantry soldiers. Collett was taken from her home, without explanation, when she was six years old and placed in a children's home run by Roman Catholic nuns. At 16, she began making her own way in the world—living mostly in low-rent rooming houses and YWCAs while working as a department store candy girl, maid, cashier, door-to-door salesperson, and doing blood laboratory clean-up to support herself, including through the last year of high school and, after an improbable turn of events, college.
Cody Collett (born Patricia Marie Cody) is descended from generations of proud but impoverished ancestors whose undervalued struggles to survive nevertheless enhanced the lives of those within their communities and beyond. They picked fruit, street-peddled cloth, dug graves, swept streets, cleaned houses, painted and hung wallpaper, worked in laundries and, in wartime, as cavalry and infantry soldiers. Collett was taken from her home, without explanation, when she was six years old and placed in a children's home run by Roman Catholic nuns. At 16, she began making her own way in the world—living mostly in low-rent rooming houses and YWCAs while working as a department store candy girl, maid, cashier, door-to-door salesperson, and doing blood laboratory clean-up to support herself, including through the last year of high school and, after an improbable turn of events, college.
Years later, sample pages of her early experiences resulted in numerous admissions to New York State Writers Institute juried writing workshops at the University at Albany. A residency fellowship from the Edna St. Vincent Millay Colony followed, as did invitations that included readings at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s WRPI radio and the Hudson Opera House. It was during a NYS Writers Institute master workshop that the writer roughed out an initial structure for what would eventually become her memoir. Soon after, she received an institute fellowship to Lugano, Switzerland. Excerpts of the work, more recently, have earned juried workshop retreat space from the Delaware Division of the Arts. Collett's work, The UNDERTAKERS, is now completed.
“It was necessitated by my fierce alignment with the millions of my country’s marginalized populations currently struggling, in one way or another, for self-determination, peace; for a way for some part of themselves to survive,” Collett says of the work, which was decades in the making and is nonconventional in vision and approach. This lifelong alignment has been evidenced in Collett’s earlier work life, too, including: at Skidmore College, with the former Head Start Supplementary Training that provided one-on-one guidance through career-ladder education for Head Start community staff; tutoring with the English as a Second Language program for Department of Defense spouses in Germany; conference center assistance and outreach in support of the work of the Religious Society of Friends—Quakers; in the Alaskan interior, as an Information Specialist with VISTA (the domestic Peace Corps), expanding access to economic, social, educational and health resources to challenged residents including non-Indian, Indian and Native Alaskan children, adults and elders.
The writer has a broad liberal arts education. During her five-year stay in Alaska, further studies at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks were concentrated in Philosophy and Journalism. She was the Journalism Department’s magazine articles editor there. Also, while still a student, her first professional writing effort became a multi-page All-Alaska Weekly feature story. As a freelance journalist, publication of stories and photographs in magazine and newspaper media continued. When living in Europe, in addition, Cody Collett was a commentary columnist for the Stars and Stripes/Europe & Pacific.
Currently, the writer lives in Delaware where she is at work on her next book.
Years later, sample pages of her early experiences resulted in numerous admissions to New York State Writers Institute juried writing workshops at the University at Albany. A residency fellowship from the Edna St. Vincent Millay Colony followed, as did invitations that included readings at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s WRPI radio and the Hudson Opera House. It was during a NYS Writers Institute master workshop that the writer roughed out an initial structure for what would eventually become her memoir. Soon after, she received an institute fellowship to Lugano, Switzerland. Excerpts of the work, more recently, have earned juried workshop retreat space from the Delaware Division of the Arts. Collett's work, The UNDERTAKERS, is now completed.
“It was necessitated by my fierce alignment with the millions of my country’s marginalized populations currently struggling, in one way or another, for self-determination, peace; for a way for some part of themselves to survive,” Collett says of the work, which was decades in the making and is nonconventional in vision and approach. This lifelong alignment has been evidenced in Collett’s earlier work life, too, including: at Skidmore College, with the former Head Start Supplementary Training that provided one-on-one guidance through career-ladder education for Head Start community staff; tutoring with the English as a Second Language program for Department of Defense spouses in Germany; conference center assistance and outreach in support of the work of the Religious Society of Friends—Quakers; in the Alaskan interior, as an Information Specialist with VISTA (the domestic Peace Corps), expanding access to economic, social, educational and health resources to challenged residents including non-Indian, Indian and Native Alaskan children, adults and elders.
The writer has a broad liberal arts education. During her five-year stay in Alaska, further studies at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks were concentrated in Philosophy and Journalism. She was the Journalism Department’s magazine articles editor there. Also, while still a student, her first professional writing effort became a multi-page All-Alaska Weekly feature story. As a freelance journalist, publication of stories and photographs in magazine and newspaper media continued. When living in Europe, in addition, Cody Collett was a commentary columnist for the Stars and Stripes/Europe & Pacific.
Currently, the writer lives in Delaware where she is at work on her next book.