Nikki Stoddard began her serious writing career when, at the age of sixteen, she became Thursday's editor of the Shortridge Daily Echo, one of five high school daily newspapers in the world at that time, 1959-1960. At the awards ceremony in May 1960, at Shortridge High School in Indianapolis, she was presented with the Al J. Kettler Award for Journalism. From that time, Nikki has been writing. Ms. Schofield is the mother of two sons, Rob who lives with his wife Vicki in Ohio, and Gaven who lives with his wife Christine and three daughters in Virginia. She has five granddaughters, Bridget, Stephanie, Abigail, Gabrielle, and Lily; one grandson, Nicholas; one great-granddaughter, Bella, and three great-grandsons, Gonzalo, Elias, and Sebastian. From 1974 to 2012, Nikki was the law librarian at the Indianapolis office of Bingham Greenebaum Doll LLP, formerly Bingham Summers Welsh & Spilman. Upon entering phased retirement, she took a second job as the staff genealogist at Crown Hill Cemetery, where she works on Fridays. Also at Crown Hill, the third largest private cemetery in the country, Nikki serves as a tour guide specializing in the Civil War personalities. In October 2011, Nikki began volunteering one day a week at the Indiana State Library, Manuscript and Rare Book Division, where she processes collections and creates finding aids that are available on the Internet. Many of the items Nikki summarizes in these finding aids are from Civil War collections. This work enables her to read what people of that era wrote and thought, thus providing authenticity to her novels. Her latest endeavor is serving as a docent at the Indiana Medical History Museum located in the old Pathology Building on the grounds of the former Central State Hospital. She began training in June and gave her first tour in August 2015. Nikki hopes to use her knowledge from this volunteer service to write with more accuracy about Civil War medicine. A member of Speedway Baptist Church, Ms. Schofield is chairman of the deacons for 2016, moderator of the business meetings, adult Sunday school teacher, and assistant treasurer. For five years, she served as one of two representatives from the North Central region on the Coordinating Council of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship with which her church is affiliated. In April 2014, she was elected Moderator of the North Central Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. As president of the Indianapolis Civil War Round Table for three terms, Nikki has also served the club as director for the annual trips, secretary, and newsletter editor. For many years, Ms. Schofield gave first-person presentations of Civil War women, including Belle Boyd, Confederate spy; Mary Surratt, Lincoln conspirator; Mary Ann Morrison Jackson, wife of Stonewall Jackson; Helen Pitts Douglass, the second wife of orator and abolitionist Frederick Douglass; Anzolette Page Pendleton, wife of General Robert E. Lee's chief of artillery, General William Nelson Pendleton; Susan Pendleton Lee, wife of Edwin Gray Lee, Confederate commissioner to Canada; Lucinda Morton, the wife of Indiana's Civil War Governor; Susan Slater, Confederate spy; and several others. Ms. Schofield is a member of the Baptist History & Heritage Society, the Fellowship of Baptist Historians, and the Society of Civil War Historians.
