Celebrated UA Alumna will have Book Signing on Campus

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – Aileen Kilgore Henderson, author of “Tenderfoot Teacher: Letters from the Big Bend, 1952-1954,” will be reading and signing copies of her book at a reception on Tuesday, Sept. 24 on The University of Alabama campus.

The reception will be from 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. at the McLure Education Library. Copies of Henderson’s book will be available at the reception. The reading will take place at 5 pm.

For 15 years Henderson freelanced short stories and articles illustrated with her photographs to national magazines and newspapers including Christian Science Monitor, Chicago Tribune, Southern Review, Sierra, Children’s Digest, Equus and Odyssey.

Her first book for children, “The Summer of the Bonepile Monster,” won the Milkweed Prize for Children’s Literature in 1995 and the Alabama Library Association Award in 1996. Her second and third books, “The Monkey Thief” and “Treasure of Panther Peak,” also received awards and honors.

In 2001 the University of South Carolina Press, as a part of their women’s diaries series, published her adult non-fiction book, “Stateside Soldier.” In 2002 Texas Christian University Press brought out her second adult non-fiction book, “Tenderfoot Teacher: Letters from the Big Bend, 1952-1954.”

Henderson grew up in Alabama and today lives in Tuscaloosa County. She served in the Women’s Army Corps during World War II as an airplane engine mechanic and a photo lab technician. After the war she graduated from The University of Alabama and taught school in Northport, Ala., Panther Junction, Texas and Stillwater, Minn. She has lived in several national parks where her husband worked as a ranger and a naturalist.

Henderson has worked with children in Scouting and church groups, in a home for abused women and children and as a docent in historical and art museums. She is a member of the Guild of Professional Writers for Children in Tuscaloosa, the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and Delta Kappa Gamma. She serves on the board of directors for the Alabama Writers’ Forum and also for the Tuscaloosa Friends of the Library. Since the spring of 1988 Henderson has been a proofreader for Alabama Heritage magazine.