Kort, Carol 1945-

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KORT, Carol 1945-

PERSONAL: Born July 25, 1945, in Jersey City, NJ; daughter of Jack and Florence (Tunkel) Chvat; married Michael Kort (a professor), August 30, 1968; children: Eleza Natasha. Education: Attended Washington University, St. Louis, 1963-65, and Sorbonne, University of Paris, 1965-66; New York University, B.A., 1968. Politics: Liberal. Religion: Jewish.

ADDRESSES: Home—20 Abbottsford Rd., Brookline, MA 02146. Offıce—Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138. Agent— Stephen Axelrod, Curtis Brown Ltd., 575 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10022.

CAREER: Writer, editor, and advertising and public relations professional. Schenkman Publishing Co., Inc., Cambridge, MA, director of advertising, 1970-72; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, editor of newsletter of Fogg Art Museum, 1972-73; Lesley College, Cambridge, MA, director of public relations, 1973-78; Harvard University, director of public relations of special programs at Graduate School of Design, 1978—. Member of board of directors of Wider Opportunities for Women.

MEMBER: Women in Communications, Authors Guild.

AWARDS, HONORS: Award from Council for Advancement and Support of Education, 1977, for article "Do One Thing and Do It Well."

WRITINGS:

(Editor, with Ronnie Friedlander) The Mothers' Book:Shared Experiences, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1981.

(Editor, with Ronnie Friedlander) The Fathers' Book:Shared Experiences, G. K. Hall (Boston, MA), 1986.

A to Z of American Women Writers, Facts on File (New York, NY), 2000.

(With Liz Sonneborn) A to Z of American Women in the Visual Arts, Facts on File (New York, NY), 2002.

Contributor of articles and poems to magazines and newspapers, including Sojourner, Genesis, Gnosis, Boston Sunday Globe Magazine, New York Times Education Life Magazine, and Tufts Literary Review. Coeditor of local newsletter of Women in Communications. Contributor of weekly and monthly columns to the Boston Herald American.

SIDELIGHTS: In A to Z of American Women Writers, Carol Kort offers biographical profiles and critical summaries for more than 150 important women writers from the seventeenth century to modern times. The biographical sketches cover authors who have significantly influenced American writing and literature. Profiles contain biographical information on each listee, including personal details, information on literary influences, analysis of the importance of the listee's works, and more. Sketches include bibliographical citations for further readings on the author. About fifty sketches include photographs. A detailed index provides indexing by writer's birth year, literary genre, region where the writer lived, and the author's subject matter, personal background, and literary style. Included are profiles of major literary figures, genre writers, epistolarians, journalists, and other writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Ursula K. LeGuin, Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, Rita Dove, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Nellie Bly, Kate Chopin, and Willa Cather. A Booklist reviewer noted that "the writers profiled represent diversity of style, genre, ethnicity, and subject matter as well as time period and region in which they lived and worked." Neal Wyatt, writing in Library Journal, called the book "a solid compendium of biographical profiles." Kort "notes that she has chosen these writers because they have all created an impressive body of work and contributed to the usually male-dominated canon of American letters," the Booklist critic remarked.

Kort's A to Z of American Women in the Visual Arts is structured similarly to her volume on writers, providing biographical sketches of more than 130 important American women working in the visual arts from colonial-era America to the present day. Listees come from media such as photography, sculpture, painting, printmaking, performance art, architecture, and other areas of visual art. Sketches provide biographical information on each artist, plus dates of activity and details on media used. Brief bibliographies provide references to additional secondary sources for more information. Fifty-five entries include a portrait of the artist. The book includes a section entitled "Recommended Sources on American Women in the Visual Arts," which includes references to books, periodicals, and Web sites relevant to the subject matter. A detailed index rounds out the volume's contents. A Booklist reviewer called the book "a well-written reference tool that gives a good deal of information in a relatively short space." Cynthia A. Johnson, writing in Library Journal, noted that "the informal tone makes the text extremely readable." In a review in Feminist Collections: A Quarterly of Women's Studies Resources, critic Carrie Kruse commented, "The substantial length and readability of the profiles in A to Z, however, offer a nice introduction to each artist, and the bibliographies are thoughtfully selected and include information for finding some articles online." Both Kruse and the Booklist reviewer remarked on the lack of pictures of the artists' works in the book, but still awarded high praise for the work's conciseness and usefulness.

The Fathers' Book: Shared Experiences, edited by Kort and Ronnie Friedland and published in 1986, is a follow-up to the duo's 1981 volume The Mothers' Book. Roselle M. Lewis, writing in the Los Angeles Times, called The Fathers' Book a "fine anthology." The essays explore the profoundly transformative power of the birth of a child, and how fathers are deeply affected by the experience of becoming a parent. Fathers of varying types, including those awaiting planned and unplanned births, fathers of children with disabilities, older and younger fathers, and stepfathers all share their experiences. "With candor, force, and sometimes passionate intensity, seventy fathers express and describe widely varying viewpoints and experiences," Lewis noted.

Carol Kort told CA: "The combination of being a freelance writer and editor, mother, and author of freelance travel articles makes for an unstable but captivating life."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, June 1, 2000, review of A to Z of AmericanWriters, p. 1942; July, 2002, review of A to Z of American Women in the Visual Arts, p. 1874.

Feminist Collections: A Quarterly of Women's StudiesResources, summer, 2002, Carrie Kruse, review of A to Z of American Women in the Performing Arts and A to Z of American Women in the Visual Arts, p. 23.

Library Journal, April 15, 1981, review of TheMothers' Book: Shared Experiences, p. 876; May 1, 1986, Susan A. McBride, review of The Fathers' Book: Shared Experiences, p. 127; October 15, 1999, Neal Wyatt, review of A to Z of American Writers, p. 64; May 1, 2002, Cynthia A. Johnson, review of A to Z of American Women in the Visual Arts, pp. 90-91.

Los Angeles Times, November 6, 1986, Roselle M. Lewis, review of The Fathers' Book, p. 12.

Ms., April, 1982, Lisa Cronin Wohl, review of TheMothers' Book, p. 77.

Publishers Weekly, March 13, 1981, Sally A. Lodge, review of The Mothers' Book, p. 85.

School Library Journal, June, 2000, Claudia Moore, review of A to Z of American Women Writers, p. 176.