by Gail Wronsky (Author), Gronk (Illustrator)
A collaboration by a legendary artist and a writer hailed by David St. John as "a poet of lasting beauty and relentless invention" Gronk was raised in East Los Angeles and lives in downtown LA. Gail Wronsky was raised in suburban Detroit and lives in the hippie haven of Topanga Canyon. But as artists they have found common ground--a shared commitment to the offbeat and the beautiful, to the slightly absurd and the slyly surreal, to blurring the distinction between our inner lives of dreams and imagination and our daily realities. Wronsky's poems and Gronk's drawings are equally grounded in poetic imagery. Wronsky mixes vernacular diction, or spoken language, with a more formal style in a way that is entirely unique; Gronk's signature style alludes to both street art and classical art. Both are committed to making memorable work that surprises and delights, that sharpens and feeds our everyday lives as well as our deepest selves.
Author Biography
GAIL WRONSKY is the author, coauthor, or translator of fifteen books of poetry and prose, including the poetry collections Under the Capsized Boat We Fly: New & Selected Poems; Dying for Beauty; Poems for Infidels; Fuegos Florales/Flowering Fires, a translation of the work of Argentinian poet Alicia Partnoy and the winner of the Settlement House American Poetry Prize; and Tomorrow You'll Be One of Us, coauthored with Chuck Rosenthal and illustrated by Gronk. The recipient of an Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council, she is a founding member of the Glass Table Artists Collective and lives in Topanga, California.
GRONK is a painter, printmaker, and performance artist who has created stage designs for the Santa Fe Opera, LA Opera, Latino Theater Company, and the East West Players. He has also collaborated on performances by the Kronos Quartet. He has exhibited at or curated work for many institutions, including the Hammer Museum at UCLA, the Fowler Museum at UCLA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, the Mexican Museum in San Francisco, and the San José Museum of Art. He was given a career retrospective at the University of New Mexico, where he was an artist in residence in 2002. He is a founding member of Asco, a multimedia arts collective active during the 1970s.