Our Lady of Provincetown

Author Biography

• Denise Doherty Pappas

  Denise Doherty Pappas is an English teacher (BA and MBA from Simmons College, MAT in English from Brown University) who has taught writing to Arab diplomats at the Fletcher School at Tufts University and memoir writing at their Osher Institute. A summer resident of Provincetown, Denise received a scholarship in biography from the Mailer Center and Writer’s Colony this summer studying with Dr. Deborah Martinson of Occidental College. Denise is presently writing a graphic biography of John Simmons, a nineteenth-century tailor who advanced the sale of ready-to-wear clothing to become the largest clothing manufacturer in New England by mid-century. An early feminist, he left his money to establish Simmons College in Boston (in the words of his lawyer) “to make a return to that class of women by whose labor as seamstresses he had laid the foundation of his own fortune.”