Penelope Niven

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Penelope Ellen Niven (April 11, 1939 — August 28, 2014) was an American academic and biographer. As Penelope McJunkin, she worked at a Catholic school and multiple high schools by the late 1980s. During this time period, she worked for Earlham College and the University of Illinois, Urbana as part of the Sandburg Collection Development Project. As Penelope Niven, she was a fellow at Yale University during the mid 1990s. She also held writer-in-residence positions with Greensboro College and Salem College up to the 2000s.

Apart from education, she processed Carl Sandburg's material at Connemara during the 1970s and became an archivist there in 1979. As an author, Niven contributed to two cookbooks for people with dental braces during the 1980s. Between the 1990s to 2010s, Niven wrote biographies about Sandburg, Edward Steichen and Thornton Wilder. She also co-wrote a 1993 memoir by James Earl Jones and her own memoir in 2004. Niven was given a North Carolina Award in 2004 and posthumously joined the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame in 2018.