ENGLISH CORNER, CON LINDA JIMÉNEZ – This week’s trivia question:   What is the only problem that Nancy had being a woman taxi driver?

N.G. Haiduck is an American poet.  She has received the Jerome Lowell DeJur Award in Creative Writing from The City College of New York, the BRIO (Bronx Recognizes Its Own) Award from the Bronx Council on the Arts, and the Janice Farrell Poetry Prize from the National League of American Pen Women.

Haiduck has contributed to many publications including Aeolian Harp Anthology, BigCityLit, Flying South, Hanging Loose, The Naugatuck Literary Review, New Verse News, Paterson Literary Review, and The Prairie Home Companion, among others.

In the early 1970s she was a young woman and new to New York City, a small town girl from Ohio, living in a two-room apartment on the Lower East Side and attending Brooklyn College. On the advice of a friend, she became a taxi driver, and wrote about her experiences in letters to a friend.  Haiduck earned a Masters degree in Education from Baruch College and an M.F.A. in poetry from City College in New York.  She subsequently became a teacher at City College. Many years later, after retirement, she used those old letters as a basis for the book Cabbie, a collection of short stories about her experiences driving a taxi in those days. The stories depict both the supportive and the frustrating aspects of driving a cab in New York, and how Nancy became more savvy about making money driving a taxi, about dealing with difficult customers, her boss, and unwanted, but sometimes tempting, male suitors, and about planning for a future.