Beryl Singleton Bissell

Beryl Singleton Bissell is a Minneapolis Star Tribune Best of 2006 Minnesota Authors. Her debut memoir, The Scent of God, was published to wide national acclaim in 2006 and was released in paperback in April 2007. Bissell was born in Saddle River New Jersey, grew up in Puerto Rico, entered a New Jersey cloister at the age of 18 and left fifteen years later when she fell in love with a priest/professor from Rome. She's been a nun, a wife, a widow, a single mother, a divorcee, and for the past ten years has been happily married to a man who is nine years younger than she is. She has worked as a set designer in Puerto Rico, as national coordinator for a Catholic lay organization based in New Jersey; designed and sold 18-karat Italian gold jewelry; was associate development director for Milkweed Editions. Her life as a writer sprouted wings when she won the 1997 Loft Creative Nonfiction Award and received a Minnesota State Arts Board grant in 2000 for her memoir-in process: The Scent of God. For the past eight years she has been a columnist for the Cook County News Herald, a free-lance writer for various regional and national magazines, and a popular blogger at Gather.com. Bissell lives on the North Shore of Lake Superior with her husband Bill and their beloved old dog Shelby. Bissell has two children, a son Thomas and a daughter Francesca who died in 2001. Three grandchildren and five step grand-children complete the family for this former nun who planned to never marry.