Stephen Davenport

Stephen Davenport's career as a teacher in and leader of independent schools and his writing career have always been seamlessly connected. He has taught and coached in both day and boarding schools and has been the head of The country School in Madison, CT, where outstanding teachers instill the love of learning in very young students, and of The Athenian School, in Danville, California, well known for its integration of experiential learning, civic engagement, global citizenship, and other critical values, with rigorous college preparatory academics. Early in his career, Trinity College conferred The Capital Area Distinguished Teacher Award on him. He published several articles in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Sunday travel section, and an article in The Saturday Review about how African-American kids were faring in elite New England boarding schools. For ten summers he was the director of Cragged Mountain Farm, a beloved boarding camp in Freedom New Hampshire. Later in his career, he led the National Association of Independent Schools ten-day workshop for new heads of school. After leaving The Athenian School, he consulted with independent schools, doing executive searches, leading professional development workshops for faculties, and coaching school heads. He is now a full-time writer and volunteer, serving on the board of The Athenian School and of Aim High which provides an exemplary free summer program of academics and youth development to under-served middle school boys and girls in the Bay Area.
The independent school world is intense and complex and Davenport draws on his long experience of it in the creation of the Miss Oliver's School for Girls series. SAVING MISS OLIVERS is the first novel in the series. The second, NO IVORY TOWER, will come out in March, 2016, and he is currently writing THE ENCAMPMENT, the working title for the third novel in the series: Two students, one of whom is Head of School Rachel Bickham's daughter, bring food and clothing to a homeless Iraq war vet suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. But it is freezing outside, and a blizzard is forecast. He could freeze to death. Have they done all they can for him? Have they done enough? What is enough?

Davenport is also working on a series of stories tracing the life of legendary teacher, Francis Plummer. (See The Last Visit in Amarillo Bay www.amorilobay.com. Volume 13, Number 4; and Motorcycle Sunday, also in Amarillo Bay, volume 16, Number 1