During this time period, she worked for Earlham College and the University of Illinois, Urbana as part of the Sandburg Collection Development Project.
[3] Niven worked for multiple school publications while attending Greensboro College in the late 1950s.
[9] During this time period, she started processing Carl Sandburg's written material that was at Connemara.
[11] Outside of Connemara, McJunkin went to Earlham College in 1978 to work on the Sandburg Collection Development Project as a director.
[19] She helped her daughter create the 1988 book Teen Cuisine: A Cookbook for Young People Who Wear Orthodontic Braces.
[8] As a children's book author, Niven wrote Carl Sandburg: Adventures of a Poet in 2003 while the pictures were provided by Marc Nadel.
[33] Her book with Jones included journal entries and a timeline of his works while taking four years to complete.
[36] Reviewers from The Boston Globe and Winston-Salem Journal had different opinions on the length of Niven's book about Steichen.
[29] While reviewing Niven's biography on Wilder for The Boston Globe, Patti Hartigan believed that information about what people and places looked like were not included.
[39] In 1984, Niven received a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies for her Sandburg work.
[43] In 2004, Carl Sandburg: Adventures of a Poet won the Children's and Young Adults' Book Award in the Intermediate Nonfiction category from the International Literacy Association.
[48] Salem College created the Penelope Niven Award for Creative Writing in 1998 while the Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award was created by the Salem College Center for Women Writers in 2002.