Marlene A. Bumgarner

Marlene Bumgarner is a lifelong educator, author, and advocate for wholesome living.
Her first book, The Book of Whole Grains (St. Martin’s Press, 1976) now updated as The New Book of Whole Grains (1997), and is available as an e-book, grew out of her work teaching cultural history to fourth graders and launched her early career as a food writer. She went on to write a weekly column for the San Jose Mercury News, serve as a contributing editor for Mothering Magazine, teach popular cooking classes, run a natural foods store, and publish Organic Cooking for (Not-So-Organic) Mothers (Chesbro Press, 1982). She also contributed to Real Food Places to Eat (Rodale, 1976) and The Peoples’ Cook Book (St. Martin’s, 1977).

A return to graduate school led Marlene into higher education, where she spent decades teaching developmental psychology and educational theory. Her textbook Working With School Age Children was first published in 2003 and later revised and expanded by Pearson in 2009 and again in 2015. 

Now retired from full-time teaching, Marlene is the author of Back to the Land in Silicon Valley (2020), a memoir about raising children, animals, and vegetables on a rural homestead in the 1970s. She is currently polishing her first novel and researching a book on 21st-century grandparenting.

Marlene writes a monthly blog and sends a regular newsletter to her community. When she’s not writing, she speaks to parent groups, teacher in-service programs, and conferences—and spends as much time as possible walking by the ocean with her Border Collie, Kismet. She still grows, prepares, and eats organic food, and loves sharing her recipes.