Tobias: Tales From the Past at the Old Stone House

Mary Louise “Cookie” Soldo Schultz, recently retired from the Honors College at West Virginia University, has enjoyed more than a forty-year career in primary, secondary, and higher education. She is the recipient of numerous teaching awards and has received prestigious grants, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the West Virginia Humanities Council and a Quarry Farm Fellowship from the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College. Cookie holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in French Language and Literature and Art History. Her publications include a chapter entitled “Studies in France” in Blanche Lazzell: The Life and Work of an American Modernist (2004), the essay on Blanche Lazzell in the West Virginia Encyclopedia (2006) and a children’s book entitled Tobias: The Mouse in the Old Stone House (2015) which is the first in this series and has received an honorable mention in the London Book Festival and a Mom’s Choice Gold Award. She co-authored, with her husband Bernie, the Instructor’s Manual for the sixth edition of H.W. Janson’s History of Art (2001) and a chapter entitled “Cass Gilbert and the Classical Tradition” in Cass Gilbert’s West Virginia State Capital (2014). Cookie authored the essay on Blanche Lazzell in Central to Their Lives: Southern Women Artists in the Johnson Collection (2018). Her most recent activity is the co-creation of a podcast on a canto from Dante’s Divine Comedy for the Dante Society of America (2020). Cookie lives in Morgantown with her husband.