Judithstory—Motivating Memoirs

Author • Speaker • Teacher

Judith Mudd-Krijgelmans is a former Foreign Service officer and diplomat who has drawn on her life experiences to write two memoirs: Flowers for Brother Mudd, 2018, and Chocolates for Mary Julia, 2022. Having led memoir writing groups in the last 15 years, her presence in literary writing has emerged ever since the publication of her first book. Based on her story, she has been engaging audiences on the difficult topic of American diversity and how, given its slave past, the United States is viewed in the world.

Judith Mudd-Krijgelmans

Judithstory Books

Flowers for Brother Mudd
One Woman’s Path from Jim Crow to Career Diplomat

Judith’s memoir explores the paradox of an African American who craved a wider world beyond the confines of Jim Crow. She shows how a girl from Louisville, Kentucky’s Smoketown, forged independent-mindedness to survive a segregated society and what propelled her to jet across the world for three decades in a career she had chosen when she was 16.This former diplomat recounts the love of her upstanding father, who advanced from tobacco farming to head a school in coal country, and her imaginative mother from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Judith salutes the Ursuline Sisters, educators at Morgan State and American Universities, and India, where she went as a Fulbright scholar.Faced with a bleak future if civil rights changes hadn’t come, she shows how a person of color could strive and thrive on telling America’s story to the world.
Flowers For Brother Mudd

Chocolates For Mary Julia: Black Woman Blazes Trails as a Career Diplomat

In this follow-up memoir, Judith Mudd-Krijgelmans returns to New Delhi as a U.S. diplomat, her lively five-year-old daughter at her side. Embarking on the career she’s dreamed of, she throws herself into the globe-trotting life. What lies in store for this risk-taker, whose battle with racial prejudice is not over, is what Chocolates for Mary Julia are about. As a Foreign Service officer with the U.S. Information Agency and Department of State, in a nearly 30-year career, she publicly represented the United States in Delhi, Bombay, Dhaka, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Brussels, Libreville, Bujumbura, and Brazzaville. From Washington, she oversaw eight French-speaking African public affairs posts and led the first U.S. Government civic education project in South Africa. Despite the heartache of her first relationship, she never gave up on finding love, building a family, forming effective work teams, and seeing sights around the world—all while proudly waving the flag for an ideal America yet to be realized.

Chocolates For Mary Julia: Black Woman Blazes Trails as a Career Diplomat