Deborah Cumming

Deborah Cumming wrote Recovering from Mortality during the 29 months between the discovery that she had advanced lung cancer and her death. Born in 1941, she grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, and was educated at Swarthmore College and Columbia University. A lifelong concern for disadvantaged people led her to work in prison-bail, Upward-Bound, and community-action projects in New York City and Washington, and later in an affordable-housing group in North Carolina. A teacher of writing and...See more

Deborah Cumming wrote Recovering from Mortality during the 29 months between the discovery that she had advanced lung cancer and her death. Born in 1941, she grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, and was educated at Swarthmore College and Columbia University. A lifelong concern for disadvantaged people led her to work in prison-bail, Upward-Bound, and community-action projects in New York City and Washington, and later in an affordable-housing group in North Carolina. A teacher of writing and literature, she worked with college and secondary students in New York, South Carolina, and India. While teaching in Thailand she translated and edited A Premier Book of Contemporary Thai Verse (with Montri Umavijani and Robert Cumming). She wrote short stories and poetry as well as essays; her stories are gathered in a critically acclaimed collection, The Descent of Music. She died in 2003 at her home in Davidson, North Carolina. See less