Joy kellman biography

By Johanna Neuman | Nov 30, 2011

Mosley did not become a writer overnight. A person of the book, Ella filled her son’s library card with authors like Dickens, Zola and Camus. Mosley recalls that she was not warm but believed in him and instilled in him the notion that he “was special and could do things” he “couldn’t imagine.” But for all their pride, his parents’ ambitions for their son were modest. Ella thought he might make a good hotel manager. Leroy thought there was a career in prison work, though he advised Walter to “pay the rent and do what you love.”

Mosley, part of the baby boom generation, did not seem at first to have any direction. There was what he describes as a “long-haired hippie” phase drifting around Santa Cruz and Europe. Then a chapter at Goddard College in Vermont, where he tried to get credit for cross-country hitchhiking before an advisor suggested that really he should drop out. Eventually he enrolled in another school in Vermont, Johnson State College, about as far from South Central Los Angeles as he could get, where he graduated with a degree in political science. After a brief flirtation with grad school in political theory at the University of Minnesota, he returned east to be with Joy Kellman, a dancer. They married in 1987, divorced in 2001. Kellman is Jewish; Mosley chooses not to speak of their marriage. His face looks so pained when I bring it up that I decide not to ask him about reports that his wife’s parents did not talk to their daughter for several years after she married him.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Mosley worked as a computer programmer for Mobil, IBM and Dean Witter but also tried his hand at various trades—making and selling pottery, collecting jade jewelry, opening a catering business. He was making a living, paying the rent, as his father had hoped. But he told one interviewer that during this period he felt lost, empty.

Always a reader, in the late 1980s, he

The latest Walter Mosley mystery is: What happened to his ex-wife’s money?

The “Devil in the Blue Dress” author is getting sued by ex-wife Joy Kellman, who claims that he’s been stiffing her on the approximately $500,000 he owes her under the terms of their divorce deal.

Mosley, one of former President Bill Clinton’s favorite writers, married Kellman on Sept. 5, 1987. They had no children and divorced in 2001.

Kellman’s suit says their divorce deal called for her to receive 25 percent of all the royalties and incomes he gets from his books and screenplays, including those featuring his popular Easy Rawlins character.

Mosley got advances of $1.6 million for his last three Rawlins books, but she has yet to see a dime, according to the suit.

The suit also says Kellman hasn’t been paid her cut “for certain scripts and screenplays,” and hasn’t gotten anything from the deal Mosley struck for a TV series featuring Rawlins.

The suit further charges that, contrary to the divorce agreement, Mosley withheld information about his income until last year, and still hasn’t turned over some required documents.

Mosley’s lawyer declined comment.

Mosley and Kellman both live in the Village.

dareh.gregorian@nypost.com

Teaching Philosophy

Reluctant Visionary, Dance Teacher Magazine (2012)

Excellence comes from realizing one’s personal capacity combined with selfless teamwork.

Teaching artists is a privilege. Teaching demands you attend to the psychology of each artist with patience and grace as they overcome personal obstacles and learn how to work as a team. It necessitates you dispel the marginalization of artists in the culture, empowering them to see the urgent political and social relevancy of their work. And to inspire each individual to connect to the inherent spirituality that comes from the grapple of being an artist.

Like those before me, I am a product of my own teachers, mentors and colleagues. And I was very lucky. I have carried certain lessons forward into my own teaching. I am honored to tell you about some of the people who made a profound difference in my life as an artist and teacher, and the philosophies they imparted that now imbue my own teaching.

I was a choral singer from age 6-16 and my director’s name was Mr. Wolf. Fitting, as he was an old school dictator. Controlling of us and a little out of control of himself, he provoked a giddy mixture fear and desire. He believed excellence came from realizing one’s personal capacity combined with selfless teamwork. Choir was where I became conscious of my own potential. I learned collaboration, precision, ethic and rigor. It was also where I first felt the power of music, singing Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana with 100 other vocalists and the Denver Symphony, so swept away I could barely bring my own voice forward for the emotion welling in my throat.

Laurie DeVito was my first dance teacher. She was instinctually musical, weaving her body into the composition as another instrument. She loved dancing to female pop stars with serious chops. As a vocalist myself, I had a visceral connection to their belting, brassy sound. My first class with Laurie cut me to the knees and I knew I would ha

American novelist (born 1952)

For the Brooklyn politician, see Walter T. Mosley. For the American lawyer, see Walter Mosley (lawyer). For the US Navy officer, see Walter Harold Mosley.

Walter Ellis Mosley (born January 12, 1952) is an American novelist, most widely recognized for his crime fiction. He has written a series of best-selling historical mysteries featuring the hard-boiled detective Easy Rawlins, a black private investigator living in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. They are, perhaps, his most popular works. In 2020, Mosley received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, making him the first Black man to receive the honor.

Personal life

Mosley was born in Los Angeles, California. His mother, Ella (née Slatkin), was Jewish and worked as a personnel clerk. Her ancestors had immigrated from Russia. His father, Leroy Mosley (1924–1993), was an African American from Louisiana who was a supervising custodian at a Los Angeles public school. He had worked as a clerk in the segregated US army, during the Second World War. His parents tried to marry in 1951, and while the union was legal in California, where they were living, no one would give them a marriage license.

Mosley was an only child, and he ascribes his writing imagination to "an emptiness in my childhood that I filled up with fantasies.” For $9.50 a week, he attended the Victory Baptist day school, a private African-American elementary school that held pioneering classes in black history. When he was 12, his parents moved from South Central to the more comfortable, working-class west LA. He graduated from Alexander Hamilton High School, in 1970. Mosley describes his father as a deep thinker and storyteller, a "black Socrates.” His mother encouraged him to read European classics, from Dickens and Zola to Camus. He al