BIOGRAPHY
Gerald Hausman is a natural born storyteller for children of all ages. Born in western Maryland in 1945, Gerald was blessed with parents gifted in the art of the story. Trained in theater at Highlands University in northern New Mexico, Gerald was an early practitioner of spoken word performance, and through the years has perfected the art of storytelling complete with physical action and a detailed repertoire of sound effects. He has been called "a one-man band of storytelling" and his finely honed antics on stage have earned him a stellar reputation as a performer for children and adults.
To date, Gerald has performed his stories at schools from the
Writing comes naturally to Gerald, who has penned over 70 published books for both adults and children. The titles include books about Native American and West Indian mythology including Paperback Book of the Month Club selections such as Turtle Island Alphabet and Tunkashila. Gerald's children's books and audio recordings have been widely distributed reaching more than a million young readers since 1995. Books like How Chipmunk Got Tiny Feet; Duppy Talk: West Indian Tales of Mystery and Magic; Ghost Walk; Turtle Dream; Doctor Bird; The Boy with the Sun Tree Bow have gone into many editions — from animated film to audio book and from Great Books Foundation texts to Pearson anthologies for schools.
For many years, Gerald was a National Endowment recipient touring New England as a Poet in the Schools, where he spoke and lectured at both colleges and secondary schools. He also taught Creative Writing at The Windsor Mountain School in Lenox, Massachusetts and at Connecticut State College in New Britain. At the same time, he was an editor at publishing houses including Overlook/Viking. Along with his wife Loretta and their friend David Silverstein, Gerald co-founded The Bookstore Press which published some of the first, inexpensive paperback books for children. Their authors included Ruth Krauss, Maurice Sendak, Crockett Johnson, David Kherdian, Nonny Hogrogian, Dorothy Kunhardt and many others.
After seven years living in New England, Gerald and Loretta returned to New Mexico to raise their two daughters Hannah and Mariah. The family stayed in the Southwest for twenty years, while Gerald earned his living as a teacher at Santa Fe Preparatory School and as an editor at Sunstone Press. He also spent much of his time collecting Native American folktales from Navajo and Pueblo friends. As the years went by, he recorded Navajo stories on tape and presented them to the Navajo Tribal Council for radio broadcast on KTNN, a Navajo Nation radio station.
In the summer of 1986 Gerald and his family lived in Jamaica where they operated an accredited summer program for creative writing. This program lasted from 1986-1993 and during those years Gerald and Loretta collected West Indian myths from storytellers on the north coast of the island. Eventually this led to a series of books about folklore of the West Indies, whose titles include The Kebra Nagast: The Lost Bible of Faith and Wisdom from Ethiopia and Jamaica; The Boy from Nine Miles: The Early Life of Bob Marley; and Three Little Birds (from the Bob Marley song).
Today, Gerald is active as a storyteller in schools ranging from pre-K to the college level. The Hausmans spend their down time writing books at their island home on the West Coast of Florida that they share with a Great Dane, a dachshund, two cats, a parrot and a tank full of vegetarian sharks. New books from Gerald include Time Swimmer, a sci-fi fantasy for 10-and-up published by Macmillan Caribbean and a revised paperback edition of the all ages classic Prayer to the Great Mystery: The Uncollected Writings and Photographs of Edward S. Curtis, World Wisdom, 2009.
They are close to their daughters in Miami and their three Jamaican grandchildren. Mariah teaches at the University of Miami. An illustrator and graphic artist, she owns Ital Art Studio and is a editorial and artistic director for Tuff Gong Books, a Marley family company. Hannah is Director of External Relations for the Miami Children's Museum, a position which she has held for a number of years.
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