Jennie Helderman broke the glass ceiling at age 10 by becoming the first girl page in the Alabama State Legislature. That surge of girl power would not be the last time she saw a need to put women’s issues at the forefront.
In the 1970s, after she helped set up a crisis-call center in an old house, a cry for help at the other end of the phone line incised her memory with indelible ink. That call was the catalyst; eventually, the empty bedrooms upstairs served as the community’s first shelter for victims of domestic abuse.
From there, Helderman began work with women’s issues and leadership, community development, public relations and communications, beginning in Gadsden, Alabama, and reaching to national levels.
At the community and state level, she has championed women’s and children’s issues and worked with child abuse victims. From 2000 until her term expired in 2006, she presided over the six-member board of the Alabama Department of Human Resources, which serves 520,000 clients each month and oversees all family abuse issues in the state.
Two coauthored nonfiction books, Christmas Trivia and Hanukkah Trivia (both first published by Crane Hill Publishers and republished by Gramercy Press in 2002) gave Helderman a quick and thorough immersion in book promotion, from an NPR interview, to television appearances, to radio interviews and book signings, to speaking to every group that would hear her.
She has received awards and recognition for her writing, the most recent in 2006, when one of her short stories was nominated for the 2007 Pushcart Prize for Fiction.
Jennie with Masai chief in Kenya
Helderman’s hobbies include photography, bridge, travel and history. Travels spanning five continents have afforded her an exceptional worldview. She made the pilgrimage of the Camino de Santiago de Compostella in Spain in 2000. In the summer of 2002, she worked as a photographer on an Earthwatch archaeology project at the Scavi in Pompeii, Italy. She has hiked and rafted the Grand Canyon twice; visited 47 US states and five continents; climbed Mt. Vesuvius; and photographed the Masai people and wild animals in Kenya and Tanzania.
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