No mention of Franklin Rosemont would be anywhere near complete without Penelope Rosemont -- a great intellect, artist, poet and person.
Together, she and Franklin - a wonderful pair of revolutionary artists, thinkers, and trouble-makers in the best sense of the word -- shared everything life had to offer. To this writer they exemplified the joyful but unyielding revolutionary spirit that has always been a part of Chicago -- simply because people like Franklin and Penelope (and Tristan and Angel) choose to live and make their artistic / cultural stand here.
The following is from American Pink: Penelope Rosemont, attended Lake Forest College. She has been a painter, photographer, collagist and writer, and "graphic designer for and other publications," Her painting The Night Time is the Right Time "was selected by the Chicago Jazz Institute for the 2000 Chicago Jazz Festival t-shirt".
Penelope Rosemont is the editor of Surrealist Women: An International Anthology and The Story of Mary Maclane & Other Writings by Mary Maclane. She is the author of Surrealist Experiences: 1001 Dawns, 221 Midnights, and books of poetry, including Beware of the Ice, and Athanor. She wrote a forward to Crime & Criminals: Address to the Prisoners in the Cook County Jail & Other Writings on Crime by Clarence Darrow. In 2008 her memoir came out, Dreams & Everyday Life, André Breton, Surrealism, Rebel Worker, SDS & the Seven Cities of Cibola. A collection of true stories of Chicago, Armitage Avenue Transcendentalists edited by Rosemont and Janina Ciezadlo came out in 2009.
In 1983 she and her husband Franklin Rosemont became directors of Charles H. Kerr & Company, a publisher of books on history and radical history in Chicago
The Alternatives in Publication Task Force of the Social Responsibilities Round Table of the American Library Association awarded the Rosemonts and Carlos Cortez the 2001 Jackie Eubanks Memorial Award "recognize outstanding achievement in promoting the acquisition and use of alternative materials in libraries." |