Stompin' at the Savoy

Bebe Moore Campbell 1950-2006

Bebe Moore Campbell (b. 1950) is an award-winning author and a journalist. In her 1989 memoir, Sweet Summer: Growing up With and Without My Dad, she recalls living in Philadelphia with her mother during the school year and spending summers with her father in North Carolina. The book has been hailed for its bittersweet remembrances of a dual childhood and life in the South at the merge of the social revolution of the 1960s. Her other nonfiction includes Successful Women, Angry Men: Backlash in the Two-Career Marriage (1986). She has written the novels Your Blues Ain't Like Mine (1992) and Brothers and Sisters (1994).

Campbell's interest in mental health prompted here to write her first children's book, Sometimes My Mommy Gets Angry, published in September 2003. This book won the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) Outstanding Literature Award for 2003. It tells the story of how a little girl copes with being reared by her mentally ill mother. Ms. Campbell was a member of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and a founding member of NAMI-Inglewood. Her book 72 Hour Hold also deals with mental illness. Her first play, "Even with the Madness", debuted in New York in June 2003.

Campbell has contributed nonfiction articles to Ms, Working Mother, Ebony, the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Seventeen, Parents, and Glamour, and is a regular commentator for National Public Radio's Morning Edition. She earned a B.S. in Elementary Education from the University of Pittsburgh. She died from complications related to brain cancer on November 27, 2006.

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