Nancy Howard Cobb

Nancy Howard Cobb is the author of In Lieu of Flowers: A Conversation for the Living (Pantheon Books, 2000, 2002 /Books for a Better Life Nominee/featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show) which went into a fourth printing in hardcover before it was issued in paperback (now in its fourth printing) with a new introduction following the events of September 11, 2001. Since then she has spoken about grief, mourning, and living with dying, in hospices, medical schools, professor grand rounds, bookstores, end of life conferences, to women’s groups, and on radio and television programs across the country. Cobb has interviewed a wide range of people, in print and on radio, including Jane Goodall, Jonas Salk, Chuck Yeager, Studs Terkel and Shelby Foote for the tenth anniversary of the Discovery Channel. Her first book, How They Met (Random House, Turtle Bay Books, 1992), chronicled the meetings of thirty couples, among them: Jay and Mavis Leno, Kyra Sedgwick and Kevin Bacon, Carly Simon and Jim Hart, Carol and Walter Matthau. As the host of two public radio programs, Connecticut Voices and The Sunken Garden Poetry Festival, Cobb interviewed writers and poets including Arthur Miller, Annie Dillard, Maurice Sendak, William Styron, Billy Collins, Richard Wilbur, Sharon Olds, Stanley Kunitz, Francine du Plessix Gray, and Galway Kinnell. A former actor, Cobb also authored The Kids’ Letter Writer Book illustrated by Laura Cornell.