Lorelei Brush
Lorelei Brush holds two doctoral degrees, both of which inform her writing. The first is in Developmental Psychology, the study of human beings as they grow from birth to death. For more than thirty years, Dr. Brush used her knowledge in this field to research and evaluate children’s learning. Her two non-fiction books address the specific issue of girls’ participation in mathematics .
Starting in 1996, Dr. Brush worked in international education, spending 2006 to 2008 managing a large USAID-funded education project in the northwestern part of Pakistan, an area that was seriously affected by an earthquake in October 2005. During her years abroad, she directed a staff of about two hundred seventy and completed her Doctor of Ministry degree, which included an intensive study of Islam. The Pakistani women with whom she worked inspired her first novel, Uncovering, a tale of a group of Pakistani women confronted with the severe restrictions of fundamentalist Islam.
After retiring in 2008 and completing that novel, she spent six months in the National Archives researching the exploits of her father, who was a captain in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in World War II. He’d told his children gripping stories about his time as a spy, and she tried to track each one of them down to use as the basis of the new novel. Unfortunately, all his stories were lies. So, instead of a spy thriller, she wrote her second novel, Chasing the American Dream, as the quest of a man in the 1950’s to be the hero he didn’t have the chance to be during the war.
Her third novel, The Boy With the Butterfly Mind, arose from her experience raising a child with ADHD, researching the disorder, and talking with other families with ADHD. She created a story of a young family with a four-year-old with ADHD to allow for the freedom to embellish her situation, provide ideas of what works well and what may not, and provide a hopeful ending.
She now lives with her husband in a retirement community outside of Washington, D.C. It’s a community of good neighbors, friends, and fellow writers. Like so many empty nesters, she enjoys her visits with her son and his wife, and her stepchildren and their families. In her spare time she reads novels, sings alto with a church choir, hikes, and shows up for healthy workouts at the gym.
1. Lorelei R. Brush, Encouraging Girls in Mathematics: The Problem and the Solution. Cambridge, MA: Abt Books, 1980; and S.F. Chipman, L. R. Brush, & D. M. Wilson, Women and Mathematics: Balancing the Equation. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1985.