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Ragdale
Ragdale is the former summer retreat of Chicago architect Howard Van Doren Shaw (1869–1926), located in Lake Forest, Illinois. It is also the home of the Ragdale Foundation, an artist residency program that hosts creators from a number of disciplines: nonfiction and fiction writers, composers, poets, play- and screenwriters, visual artists, choreographers, as well as those from interdisciplinary interests. The house and barn Built in 1897, the house and barn were built in Shaw's typical Arts and Crafts manner. The property underwent another change in 1912 as the Ragdale Ring was installed; at the outdoor theatre, Shaw's family and friends frequently performed Frances Shaw's works for the Lake Forest community, in the 1930s. Benches were incorporated to accommodate over 200 audience members. Ragdale was also where Sylvia Shaw Judson (1897–1978), Howard's daughter, sculpted her piece ''Bird Girl'', which is prominently featured on the cover of John Berendt's best-selling ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sylvia Shaw Judson
Sylvia Shaw Judson (1897–1978) was a professional sculptor who worked first in Chicago and later in Lake Forest, Illinois. She created a broad range of sculptural artworks, notably garden pieces depicting children and animals. For more than fifty years she sculpted life-size human figures in an era when critics and curators favored abstract works. Many years after she died, her serenely simple ''Bird Girl'' came to be widely known and admired. A child of a well-to-do family, Sylvia Shaw Judson enjoyed idyllic carefree summers and the benefits of private schools, foreign travel, social connections, and several years of training and internship with the best teachers. Even after she became an acclaimed artist in her own right, she continued to be identified as the daughter of Howard Van Doren Shaw, a prominent architect who died in 1926, early in her career. She called him "the most important influence on my life as a sculptor." Forty years after her father's death, Judson dedic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Howard Van Doren Shaw
Howard Van Doren Shaw AIA (May 7, 1869 – May 7, 1926) was an architect in Chicago, Illinois. Shaw was a leader in the American Craftsman movement, best exemplified in his 1900 remodel of Second Presbyterian Church in Chicago. He designed Marktown, Clayton Mark's planned worker community in Northwest Indiana. Early life and career Howard Van Doren Shaw was born in Chicago, Illinois on May 7, 1869. His father Theodore was a successful dry goods businessman and was part of the planning committee for the World's Columbian Exposition. His Dutch-American mother Sarah (née Van Doren) was a prolific painter and a member of the Bohemian Club. Howard had one brother, Theodore, Jr. His family resided at 2124 Calumet Avenue, then a part of the Prairie Avenue district, the heart of the social fabric of the city. Prairie Avenue was also the site of Chicago's most modern residential architecture, including Henry Hobson Richardson's John J. Glessner House. Howard Shaw met Frances Wells ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bird Girl
''Bird Girl'' is a sculpture made in 1936 by Sylvia Shaw Judson in Lake Forest, Illinois. It was sculpted at Ragdale, her family's summer home, and achieved fame when it was featured on the cover of the 1994 non-fiction novel ''Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil''. Originally exhibited as ''Girl with Bowls'' at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1938, it was also exhibited as ''Fountain Figure'', ''Standing Figure'', and ''Peasant Girl''. A 1967 book by Judson first referred to it as ''Bird Girl''. Description ''Bird Girl'' is cast in bronze and stands tall. She is the image of a young girl wearing a simple dress and a sad or contemplative expression "...that stands solid and quietly, a strong and simple form", "... a serene spirit that offers us in this troubled age the tranquility we find too seldom". The work was originally commissioned as a garden sculpture for a family in Massachusetts. A slight, eight-year-old model named Lorraine Greenman (now Lorraine Ganz) pose ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lake Forest, Illinois
Lake Forest is a city located in Lake County, Illinois, United States. Per the 2020 census, the population was 19,367. The city is along the shore of Lake Michigan, and is a part of the Chicago metropolitan area and the North Shore. Lake Forest was founded with Lake Forest College and was laid out as a town in 1857, a stop for travelers making their way south to Chicago. The Lake Forest City Hall, designed by Charles Sumner Frost, was completed in 1898. It originally housed the fire department, the Lake Forest Library, and city offices. History Early History The Potawatomi inhabited Lake County before the United States Federal Government forced them out in 1836 as part of Indian Removal of tribes to areas west of the Mississippi River. As Lake Forest was first developed in 1857, the planners laid roads that would provide limited access to the city in an effort to prevent outside traffic and isolate the tranquil settlement from neighboring areas. Though the town is consid ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lawrence Block
Lawrence Block (born June 24, 1938) is an American crime writer best known for two long-running New York-set series about the recovering alcoholic P.I. Matthew Scudder and the gentleman burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr. Block was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 1994. Early life Lawrence Block was born June 24, 1938Rippetoe, Rita Elizabeth (July 23, 2004)''Booze and the Private Eye: Alcohol in the Hard-Boiled Novel'' McFarland & Company, p. 130. Archived at Google Books. Retrieved June 18, 2018. in Buffalo, New York, where he was raised. He attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, but left before graduating. Career Block's earliest work, published pseudonymously in the 1950s, was mostly in the soft-porn mass market paperback industry, an apprenticeship he shared with fellow mystery author Donald E. Westlake. Block describes the early sex novels as a valuable experience, noting that despite the titillating content of the books (rather mild by later ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Elizabeth Alexander (poet)
Elizabeth Alexander (born May 30, 1962) is an American poet, essayist, playwright, and the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation since 2018. Previously she was a professor for 15 years at Yale University, where she taught poetry and chaired the African American studies department. In 2015, she was appointed director of creativity and free expression at the Ford Foundation. She then joined the faculty of Columbia University in 2016, as the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor in the Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Early life Alexander was born in Harlem, New York City, and grew up in Washington, D.C. She is the daughter of former United States Secretary of the Army and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chairman Clifford Alexander, Jr. and Adele Logan Alexander, a professor of African-American women's history at George Washington University and writer. Her brother Mark C. Alexander was a senior adviser to the Barack Obama presidential c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kelly Cherry
Kelly Cherry (December 21, 1940 – March 18, 2022) was a novelist, poet, essayist, professor, and literary criticKelly Cherry: A poetic voice for the atomic age by James T. Keane, , April 05, 2022. and a former Poet Laureate of Virginia (2010–2012).Virginia Law and Library of Congress List of Poets L ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lynda Barry
Linda Jean Barry (born January 2, 1956) is an American cartoonist. Barry is best known for her weekly comic strip ''Ernie Pook's Comeek''. She garnered attention with her 1988 illustrated novel ''The Good Times are Killing Me'', about an interracial friendship between two young girls, which was adapted into a play. Her second illustrated novel, ''Cruddy'', first appeared in 1999. Three years later she published ''One! Hundred! Demons!'', a graphic novel she terms "autobifictionalography". ''What It Is'' (2008) is a graphic novel that is part memoir, part collage and part workbook, in which Barry instructs her readers in methods to open up their own creativity; it won the comics industry's 2009 Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work. In recognition of her contributions to the comic art form, Comics Alliance listed Barry as one of twelve women cartoonists deserving of lifetime achievement recognition, and she received the Wisconsin Visual Art Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jan Beatty
Jan Beatty is an American poet. She is a recipient of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, and the Creative Achievement Award in Literature. Life Born in 1952 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she received her Bachelor of Arts from the West Virginia University and her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Pittsburgh. She currently resides in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with her husband, musician Don Hollowood. Her most recent poetry collection is ''The Switching/Yard'' (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), and her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including ''Quarterly West'', ''Gulf Coast'', ''Indiana Review'', and ''Court Green'', and in anthologies published by Oxford University Press, University of Illinois Press, and University of Iowa Press. Her honors include fellowships from the Ucross Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and Yaddo. She was awarded the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry from the Tulsa Arts a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robin Becker
Robin Becker (born 1951) is an American poet, critic, feminist, and professor. She was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and is author of seven collections of poetry, most recently, Tiger Heron and Domain of Perfect Affection (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014 and 2006). Her ''All-American Girl'' (University of Pittsburgh Press), won the 1996 Lambda Literary Award in Poetry. Becker earned a B.A. in 1973 and an M.A. from Boston University in 1976. She lives in Boalsburg, Pennsylvania and spends her summers in southern New Hampshire. Teaching career Becker taught for seventeen years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and currently and is Professor of English and Women's Studies at Pennsylvania State University, where she has taught since 1993. She also teaches workshops such as those at the Summer Program Poetry Workshops at The Fine Arts Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Literary influences and praise "Becker grew up listening to her grandmother's stories ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Star Black
Star Black is a poet, photographer, and artist. She has authored seven collections of poetry and taught in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton and at The New School. She was published in ''The Paris Review'', and has written three books of sonnets, a collection of double sestinas, and a book of collaged free verse. Her poems have been anthologized in ''The Penguin Book of the Sonnet'', ''110 Stories: New York Writers After September 11'', and ''The Best American Erotic Poems: From 1880 to The Present''. Her collages have been exhibited at Poets House and The Center for Book Arts, and published in ''One of a Kind: UniqueArtists Books'' by Pierre Menard Gallery. Publications *''The Popular Vote'' (poems) (Saturnalia Press 2019) *''Velleity's Shade'' (poems), with art work by Bill Knott – (Saturnalia Books 2010) *''Ghostwood ''(sonnets) – (Melville House 2003) *''Balefire'' (poetry) – (Painted Leaf Press 1999) *''October for Idas'' (collaged free verse) – (Painted Lea ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lan Samantha Chang
Lan Samantha Chang (張嵐; pinyin: Zhāng Lán) is an American writer of novels and short stories. Life Lan Samantha Chang was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, and attended Yale University, where she earned her bachelor's degree in East Asian Studies. She worked briefly in publishing in New York City, before getting her MPA from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford. She is the Elizabeth M. Stanley Professor in the Arts at the University of Iowa and the Director of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the first woman, and the first Asian American, to hold that position. Work Chang's first book is a novella and short stories, titled ''Hunger'' (1998). The stories are set in the US and China, and they explore home, family, and loss. The ''New York Times Book Review'' called it "Elegant.… A delicately calculated balance sheet of the losses and gains of im ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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