Nancy Rhodes, international stage director, author, and educator, has directed operas all over the world, from Sweden, Finland, and Norway to Albania, Turkey and the Netherlands. As Founding Artistic Director of Encompass New Opera Theatre in New York City, she has staged over one hundred American musicals and operas by Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein, Benjamin Britten, Marc Blitzstein, Aaron Copland, and Langston Hughes, among many other composers and writers.She is currently the commissioned librettist of The Theory of Everything, with composer John David Earnest, a new opera inspired by physics' superstring theory of multiple dimensions and alternate universes, recipient of two prestigious National Endowment for the Arts grants. Her opera libretto, Ocean Dream, is published in Facing Forward by Broadway Play Publishing.She served on the faculty of Manhattan School of Music for twelve years and taught master classes at the Curtis Institute of Music, the University of the Theatre of Nations, and in Argentina and Korea. She holds an MFA from New York University.It was while in Turkey directing a production of West Side Story that she had the experience which resulted in this book: Mary's Story - The Beauty of the Lonely Heart: The Untold Revelation in Her Own Words.