Arroyo, Raymond

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Arroyo, Raymond

PERSONAL: Married; wife's name Rebecca; children: two sons, one daughter. Education: Graduated from Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.

ADDRESSES: Home—New Orleans, LA. Office—Eternal World Television Network, 5817 Old Leeds Rd., Irondale, AL 35210-2164. E-mail—worldover@ewtn.com.

CAREER: Writer and journalist. Eternal World Television Network, Irondale, AL, creator, director, and host of live series The World Over. Journalist for Associ-ated Press; political columnist and Capitol Hill correspondent. Also worked as an actor and director in New York, NY, and London, England.

WRITINGS:

Mother Angelica: The Remarkable Story of a Nun, Her Nerve, and a Network of Miracles, Doubleday (New York, NY), 2005.

Contributor to Wall Street Journal, Washington Times, Financial Times, and National Catholic Register.

WORK IN PROGRESS: A mystery series and a musical.

SIDELIGHTS: Raymond Arroyo, a television host for the Catholic-oriented Eternal World Television Network (EWTN), published his first book in 2005. Mother Angelica: The Remarkable Story of a Nun, Her Nerve, and a Network of Miracles is "a comprehensive and engaging biography" of the founder of EWTN, in the words of a Publishers Weekly critic. The biography relates that the woman born Rita Rizzo in 1923, was abandoned by her father at age five and often suffered illnes as a child and teenager. Then, when she was twenty-one years old, Mother Angelica experienced a healing that she attributed to God and became a Franciscan nun. She became famous after founding EWTN in 1981, as the cable network grew into a giant media outlet viewed in over one hundred countries.

Mother Angelica was written with the full cooperation of its subject, and Arroyo conducted a number of interviews with the woman both on and off the air. However, Mother Angelica suffered several debilitating strokes weeks after the interviews were completed, and her converstions with Arroyo are some of her last statements about her life and career. As Library Journal reviewer Anna M. Donnelly commented, "readers will enjoy [the] ever-humorous, feisty, and down-to-earth personality" captured in Arroyo's interviews, and went on to note that the biography is "engagingly written."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Library Journal, August 1, 2005, Anna M. Donnelly, review of Mother Angelica: The Remarkable Story of a Nun, Her Nerve, and a Network of Miracles, p. 91.

Publishers Weekly, August 29, 2005, review of Mother Angelica, p. S13.