Justine Gilmary Cullinan, née Schneider, was born in Queens Village in 1941 to Joseph Matthew and Eileen (née McEvoy) Schneider. She attended Sts. Joachim and Anne’s and St. Pascal Baylon Schools in Queens Village and Hollis, and graduated from the Mary Louis Academy in 1959. She earned a BA in English from Queens College in 1963 and thereafter became an editor, working for the American Journal of Surgery and R.R. Donnelley and later, the New York Academy of Sciences, where she managed the Annals. After the dissolution of the Academy’s editorial department in 2008 she carried out numerous independent editorial and management assignments for scientific journals, learned bodies, and scientific textbook publishers, including Oxford University Press and W.W. Norton. She enjoyed spending weekends and weeks in the summer at her tiny cottage in Springs, New York, where she swam in the Atlantic Ocean and Gardener’s Bay, visited the Springs and East Hampton Libraries, and delighted in collecting shells with her grandchildren and contemplating rocks and the sunset at Maidstone. She loved music and singing, and was a member of the parish choir at Blessed Sacrament in Brooklyn, New York and various choral societies around New York City. She loved to read, spending many a Saturday at the Central Library in Jamaica; she loved words in all forms and wielded a fine vocabulary, which she shared with everyone she met. She rejoiced in the beauty of nature, and took joy in the company of her friends.
She died in North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, Long Island, on Sunday, September 30 after sustaining a fall the day preceding. Her survivors include her husband, Denis Cullinan and daughter, Hope Cullinan, both of Queens, New York; sister, Hope Schneider of Greenfield, Massachusetts; son-in-law Chris Tamburrini and grandchildren Margaret and Ivor Cullinan Tamburrini; and nephew Jacob Schneider and niece Maria Schneider of Houston, Texas. She was preceded in death by her parents and her brothers Bart Paul Schneider and Joseph Matthew (Matt) Schneider, Jr.
Donations can be made in her memory to the Queens Library Foundation (foundation.queenslibrary.org) and the Springs Library/Springs Historical Society in East Hampton, New York.
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