Elisabeth Stevens

Author-artist Elisabeth Stevens was born in Rome, New York, lived in New York City and the Metropolitan area, and spent several decades in Baltimore, Maryland. She now lives and works in Sarasota, Florida. She is the author of six books of poetry, six books of short fiction and many monographs, articles and reviews about art, artists and writers.

A former art and architecture critic for The Baltimore Sun and a former art critic for The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The Trenton Times, Stevens is a graduate of Wellesley College and has a M.A. with High Honors in Modern Literature from Columbia University.

Instinctively "a word-picture" person, Stevens has designed and illustrated many of her books with original graphics. This 2011 BrickHouse Books' edition of Sirens' Songs represents a paperback facsimile of the 2010 Sirens' Songs, a livre di'artiste, original etchings in a clamshell box, published in a limited edition of twenty copies by Goss Press. Literary adult books in which the author and the artist are the same person are rare. The unique books of William Blake serve as prototypes, and certain late Nineteenth Century books produced in Paris with illustrations by Matisse, Picasso and others provide further inspiration.

Stevens, whose graphics have been exhibited widely (recently at Stakenborg Fine Art in Sarasota) enjoys the livre d'artiste form because it combines original art works with literature. Her first book in this genre was Eranos, a short story with five copper plate etchings, published in 2000. She is now at work on a third such book, Late Poems.