Author, Educator. She became one of the first female authors of science fiction, along with having a long teaching career. The daughter of Louis Rudolph Chlarson and Emily Vernell Rowley, she was born in Tucson, Arizona, where she lived throughout the greater part of her life. Earning her B.A. in Education in 1940 from Arizona State College, she became a teacher in the Tucson area. In 1943 she married Richard Harry Henderson although they were divorced seven years later. During World War II she taught children in France at a United States Air Force dependents' school and at a Japanese relocation camp in Sacaton, Arizona. She also taught at a children's tuberculosis sanatorium in Waterford, Connecticut, but the majority of her teaching career took place in her native Arizona. Henderson became one of the first female writers of science fiction, and was among the very few to write in the genre openly with her own name rather than a male pseudonym. She was also one of the first speculative fiction authors to include religion as subject of her writings. She is best known for her "The People" stories, tales involving the survivors and descendants of a group of humanoids stranded on Earth after escaping the destruction of their homeworld. Capable of telepathy, telekinesis and other paranormal abilities, they are scattered mostly throughout the American southwest, including some as orphaned children separated from others of their kind, and forced to assimilate into the local landscape and culture. Many of her "People" stories, having seen publication in multiple magazines through the 1950s and 1960s, were collected in novelized form in the books "Pilgrimage: The Book of the People" (1961), "The People: No Different Flesh" (1966), and later in "The People Collection" (1991) and "Ingathering: The Complete People Stories" (1995). Other collections of her writings include "The Anything Box" (1965) and "Holding Wonder" (1971). Her works have been translated into at least ten different languages. Henderson received a nomination for a Hugo award in 1959 for her novelette "Captivity," and in 1972 her story "Pottage" was made into the television movie "The People" (an early production of Francis Ford Coppola) starring William Shatner and Kim Darby (and which also received a Hugo nomination for Best Dramatic Presentation). It has also been suggested by some that the book "Escape to Witch Mountain," written by Alexander Key, published in 1968 and later made into a Disney film in 1975, was highly influenced by Henderson's "People" stories.