Jen Bryant '82 featured in article on Philly.com about her writing career

Jen Bryant '82 was featured in a Feb. 22 article on Philly.com about her career as a writer.

From Philly.com:

When she was 8 or 9, in the 1960s, Jen Bryant learned to type by copying obituary material on the desk of her father, a Flemington, N.J., undertaker.

In 2004, having already published more than a dozen books, she happened on a painting at the Brandywine River Museum by Horace Pippin, the late African American artist from West Chester.

Bookend events. From her first childhood taste of writing to her latest children's book, A Splash of Red: The Life and Art of Horace Pippin, published by Alfred A. Knopf in January.

"Even as a kid, reading these seemingly ordinary lives" in material that her father would phone to the local newspaper, Bryant said, she realized that even "gas station attendants had much bigger and more interesting lives" than passersby might have thought.

The encounter with Pippin's work happened while Bryant was teaching writing at West Chester University.

Read more