Cindy Lovell was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania. She graduated from Stetson University with a BA and MA in Elementary Education and from The University of Iowa with a Ph.D. in Education. She has two children, Angela Lovell and Adam Lovell. She is known for her work in support of Mark Twain's legacy.
Lovell wrote the narrative tracks and served as co-executive producer with Carl Jackson of , a double album benefit for the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum. Her narratives were performed by Jimmy Buffett, Clint Eastwood, Garrison Keillor, and Angela Lovell. Brad Paisley, Emmylou Harris, and others recorded the musical tracks. She also wrote the narrative tracks for Orthophonic Joy: The 1927 Bristol Sessions Revisited, another double album project with Jackson, which was a benefit for the Birthplace of Country Music Museum in Bristol, Tennessee. Lovell's narrative tracks were performed by Eddie Stubbs. Singers on the project included Dolly Parton, Keb' Mo', Marty Stuart, and others. Lovell has been a contributor to HuffPost and other publications, such as Mensa Research Journal and Florida Reading Quarterly. She contributed chapters to Reading in 2010: A Comprehensive Review of a Changing Field, Mark Twain and Youth: Studies in His Life and Writings, and is a contributing editor and author of Preparing the Way: Teaching ELs in the PreK-12 Classroom. She also co-authored Linguistics for K-12 Classroom Application with Jane Govoni. Lovell has also authored two children's novel, Rachel Mason Hears the Sound and Not This Sunday. She co-authored Down the Mississippi with CNN iReporter Neal Moore. Lovell has lectured widely on the subject of Mark Twain at a number of venues such as Oxford University, Kensal Rise Library, and the National Steinbeck Center. She is an annual speaker on the American Queen steamboat's Mark Twain cruise and has lectured at numerous educational conferences and symposia.
Media
Lovell appeared in , a documentary about Hal Holbrook's career performing as Mark Twain, directed by Scott Teems and Interpreting Twain, a documentary short directed by Paul Cotter. Interviews with Lovell have appeared on C-SPAN and CNN and in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Smithsonian Magazine, and other publications. Journalist Bob Edwards interviewed Lovell for his show on SiriusXM. Jim Trelease interviewed Lovell for The Read-Aloud Handbook.
Lovell made news around the world when she discovered the long-sought boyhood signature of Samuel Langhorne Clemens on July 26, 2019 inside the Mark Twain Cave in Hannibal, Missouri where Clemens lived from the age of 4 to 17. She had looked for the signature for decades and discovered it during a special tour with fellow Twain scholars during the quadrennial Clemens Conference hosted by the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum. Lovell and cave owner Linda Coleberd did not announce the discovery until experts had the opportunity to examine it. The signature was authenticated as belonging to Samuel Clemens by Twain scholars Alan Gribben and Kevin Mac Donnell after comparing signatures of Sam Clemens and his siblings from the time period the Clemens family lived in Hannibal. Lovell's first significant Twain discovery came during a visit to the Bermuda National Trust when she found an unsigned manuscript detailing the first time Clemens witnessed a cricket match tucked inside a scrapbook. The essay had been published in The Strand after Twain's death, but the whereabouts of the original manuscript were unknown. The manuscript was later exhibited at Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art.
