Bryan, Ashley 1923–

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Bryan, Ashley 1923–

(Ashley F. Bryan)

Personal

Born July 13, 1923, in New York, NY. Education: Earned degrees from Cooper Union and Columbia University.

Addresses

Home—Isleford, ME. Office—c/o Dartmouth College, Department of Art, Hanover, NH 03755.

Career

Painter; reteller and illustrator of books for children. Queen's College, Brooklyn, NY, instructor in painting and drawing; Lafayette College, Easton, PA, poetry instructor; teacher of children at Brooklyn Museum and Dalton School, New York, NY; Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, former instructor and professor emeritus of art and visual studies. Exhibitions: Works are included in several permanent collection, including at New York Public Library. Military service: U.S. Army, served during World War II.

Awards, Honors

American Library Association (ALA) Notable Book designation, 1974, for Walk Together Children; Parents Choice Award, 1980, and Coretta Scott King Book Award, 1981, for Beat the Story-Drum, Pum-Pum; ALA Notable Book designation, 1982, for I'm Going to Sing: Black American Spirituals; Coretta Scott King Honor Book citation, 1983, for I'm Going to Sing, 1986, for Lion and the Ostrich Chicks, and Other African Folk Tales, 1988, for What a Morning: The Christmas Story in Black Spirituals, 1992, for All Night, All Day, and 1998, for ABC of African-American Poetry; Parents

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Choice citation, 1992, for Sing to the Sun; Coretta Scott King Book Award, 2004, for Beautiful Blackbird; Hans Christian Andersen Award nomination, 2006; Silver Medallion for contributions to children's literature, University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg; Virginia Hamilton Literary Award, Kent State University.

Writings

SELF-ILLUSTRATED

The Ox of the Wonderful Horns, and Other African Folktales, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1971, reprinted, 1994.

(Reteller) The Adventures of Aku; or, How It Came about That We Shall Always See Okra the Cat Lying on a Velvet Cushion while Okraman the Dog Sleeps among the Ashes, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1976.

(Reteller) The Dancing Granny, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1977.

(Reteller) Beat the Story-Drum, Pum-Pum (Nigerian folk tales), Atheneum (New York, NY), 1980.

(Reteller) The Cat's Purr, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1985.

(Reteller) Lion and the Ostrich Chicks, and Other African Folk Tales, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1986.

(Selector) All Night, All Day: A Child's First Book of African-American Spirituals, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1988.

(Reteller) Turtle Knows Your Name, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1989.

Sing to the Sun: Poems and Pictures, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1992.

The Story of Lightning and Thunder, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1993.

Ashley Bryan's ABC of African-American Poetry, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1997.

(Reteller) Ashley Bryan's African Tales, Uh-Huh, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1998.

(Editor and author of introduction, with Andrea Davis Pinkney) Jump Back, Honey: The Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jump at the Sun/Hyperion Books for Children (New York, NY), 1999.

(Reteller) The Night Has Ears: African Proverbs, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1999.

Beautiful Blackbird, Atheneum (New York, NY), 2003.

Let It Shine: Three Favorite Spirituals, Atheneum (New York, NY), 2007.

ILLUSTRATOR

Lorenz Graham, How God Fix Jonah,, 1946, revised edition, Boyds Mills Press (Honesdale, PA), 2001

Robert Hellman and Richard O'Gorman, editors, Fabliaux: Ribald Tales from the Old French, Thomas Y. Crowell (New York, NY), 1965.

Rabindranath Tagore, Moon, for What Do You Wait? (poems), edited by Richard Lewis, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1967.

Mari Evans, Jim Flying High (juvenile), Doubleday (New York, NY), 1979.

Susan Cooper, Jethro and the Jumbie (juvenile), Atheneum (New York, NY), 1979.

John Langstaff, editor, What a Morning! The Christmas Story in Black Spirituals, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1987.

Charlamae Rollins, compiler, Christmas Gif': An Anthology of Christmas Poems, Songs, and Stories Written by and about African Americans, Morrow Junior Books (New York, NY), 1993.

George David Weiss and Bob Thiele, What a Wonderful World, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1995.

Walter Dean Myers, The Story of the Three Kingdoms, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1995.

Linda and Clay Goss, It's Kwanzaa Time!, Putnam (New York, NY), 1995.

Nikki Giovanni, The Sun Is So Quiet, Henry Holt (New York, NY), 1996.

Langston Hughes, Carol of the Brown King: Nativity Poems, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1998.

Brian Swann, The House with No Door: African Riddle-Poems, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1998.

Won-Ldy Paye and Margaret H. Lippert, Why Leopard Has Spots: Dan Stories from Liberia, Fulcrum Kids (Golden, CO), 1998.

Nikki Grimes, Aneesa Lee and the Weaver's Gift, Lothrop (New York, NY), 1999.

Naomi Shihab Nye, editor, Salting the Ocean: One Hundred Poems by Young Poets, Greenwillow Books (New York, NY), 2000.

James Berry, A Nest Full of Stars: Poems, Greenwillow Books (New York, NY), 2004.

(With Jan Spivey Gilchrist) Jan Spivey Gilchrist, My America, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 2007.

OTHER

(Compiler and illustrator) Black American Spirituals, Volume I: Walk Together Children, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1974.

(Compiler and illustrator) Paul Laurence Dunbar, I Greet the Dawn: Poems, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1978.

(Compiler and illustrator) Black American Spirituals, Volume II: I'm Going to Sing, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1982.

Sh-Ko and His Eight Wicked Brothers, illustrated by Fumio Yoshimura, Macmillan (New York, NY), 1988.

Adaptations

Beautiful Blackbird was adapted as an audiobook by Audio Bookshelf, 2004.

Sidelights

As a folklorist, Ashley Bryan shares with his fellow Americans his appreciation of the many traditions rooted in black cultures. An award-winning artist, Bryan creates paintings and drawings that grace the pages of his unique retellings of traditional African and West Indian folktales and spirituals, as well as of texts by other writers. As Bryan once commented to Sylvia and Kenneth Marantz in an interview for Horn Book, "it is the African root that nourishes whatever other world culture I may draw upon." Although Bryan has traveled to African countries such as Uganda and Kenya for creative inspiration, he has found that American libraries also provide a rich source of tribal tales. "There are so many ways in which we learn about life and the self," he wrote on the CBC Books Web site. "Each day opens paths to this exploration. For many of us, books play a major role in that adventure." In addition to his work for children, the multi-talented Bryan is also known to audiences throughout the United States for his resonating poetry readings and his lectures on black American poets. "When I'm doing a painting," the artist and folklorist told Washington Post contributor Lonnae O'Neal Parker, "I'm drawing upon the rhythm of a landscape. If I'm reading a poem, there is an essential flow of rhythm that is going to carry that poem. I have to give each work the energy that it needs to bring it alive, you see."

Although Bryan grew up in rough sections of the Bronx, he embarked on a productive path early in life. "I learned from kindergarten that drawing and painting were the toughest assets I had to offer my community," he later recalled in Illustrators of Children's Books: 1967-76. Books also played an important role in Bryan's childhood. As he noted in an essay on the CBC Books Web site, "I grew up in a large family during the Great Depression. The family funds for books were limited, but there were always stacks of books in the home. My brothers, sisters and I saw to that." Bryan and his siblings made frequent trips to their local public library, storing the books they borrowed on shelves

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made from discarded orange crates. "It made us feel that we had our own home library, a wonderful feeling." When an enterprising teacher introduced his class to book production, "I was author, illustrator, editor, publisher, and binder" of that first hand-stitched ABC book, Bryan recalled in Horn Book. The accomplishment earned a positive response from his family members.

Bryan continued to enjoy the support of family, friends, and teachers while honing his artistic abilities throughout his school-age years. This support, matched with his internal drive and enthusiasm, led to higher studies at Cooper Union Art School. After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, Bryan completed the program at Cooper Union and then went on to earn a degree in philosophy at Columbia University. While at Columbia, he also enrolled in a bookbinding course. Finding himself in his element, Bryan generated over thirty bound books, about ten times the number produced by his classmates.

After graduation, Bryan returned to the Bronx and opened a studio there. He received a visit from Atheneum editor Jean Karl while he was in the process of illustrating his first professional book, the anthology Fabliaux: Ribald Tales from the Old French. The meeting with Karl was fortuitous: she sent Bryan a contract for drawings to accompany single-line poems by Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore that were to be collected under the title Moon, for What Do You Wait? The artist told the Marantz's what followed: "Later she asked if she could use some of my illustrations for a book of African tales. I said, ‘You bet! But I don't like the way they are written.’ She said, ‘Tell them in your own way, Ashley.’" Bryan followed Karl's advice and continued to write and illustrate with her support, even after Karl went into semi-retirement.

In the first book resulting from Karl's encouragement, a five-story collection titled The Ox of the Wonderful Horns, and Other African Folktales, Bryan employed a distinctive painted style resembling woodcuts. The Dancing Granny, published in 1977, evolved from an Ashanti story collected in Antigua in the West Indies, the area from which Bryan's parents emigrated. In a Horn Book interview, Bryan described how he became inspired by a visit from his grandmother when she was in her seventies: "She picked up the latest dance steps from the great-grandchildren and outdanced them all! I drew upon that." Bryan used a Japanese brush painting technique to create a sense of movement in his illustrations for this work.

A dynamic artist whose works have extended beyond book illustration, Bryan began sharing his knowledge of painting and drawing as a teacher at Queens College in Brooklyn, but he was also able to reach younger children at schools throughout the New York City area, such as the Brooklyn Museum and Dalton School. He received his first major literary honor in 1981 when Beat the Story-Drum, Pum-Pum garnered the Coretta Scott King Book Award. The Nigerian folktales in Beat the Story-Drum, Pum-Pum reveal the origins of hostilities between animals, such as that between the snake and the frog or the bush cow and the elephant. These "retellings make the stories unique, offering insight into the heart of a culture," noted Margaret M. Burns in Horn Book. Each story "has a style and beat appropriate to the subject, the overall effect being one of musical composition with dexterously designed variations and movements." Bryan viewed his Coretta Scott King award as a catalyst for change, telling Washington Post interviewer O'Neal Parker that it signaled "publishers to bring blacks into the field." "As a result of that, you have Native Americans, Japanese, Chinese, people from India, people from Korea, all being drawn into the field of representing their people in books for young people written for all people."

When compiling a book, Bryan often uses historical documents as his source of inspiration. During the 1800s, anthropologists and missionaries translated tribal stories into English, though they emphasized preservation of the language more than the tale. Bryan begins with these materials and makes them his own. As he explained in Illustrators of Children's Books, "I take the skeletal story motifs from the scholarly collections and use every resource of my background and experi- ence to flesh them out and bring them alive." Bryan restores the "texture and vitality and drama—the back and forth play of teller and audience of the oral setting," as he explained to the Marantz's. "I try things that will give a vitality of surface, a textural feeling, a possibility of vocal play to the prose of my stories. So I take risks in my books. I do a lot of things that people writing prose generally do not do: close rhythms, rhyme, onomatopoeia, alliteration, interior rhyme." Bryan recommends that stories and poetry be "read aloud, for the reader to understand the relationship between sound, spirit, and meaning," according to Alice K. Swinger in Language Arts. "Then, when the materials are read silently, the reader will receive more benefit because the sound and the spirit will already have been felt in the muscles and heard in the ears."

In The Cat's Purr, which originated in the Antilles, Bryan retells a porquoi tale with an unexpected twist. When Cat inherits the miniature family drum, Rat insists on playing it, despite Cat's wish to the contrary. "Rat's trickery gives the story a nice bit of dramatic tension, and the notion of the tiny drum as the reason cats purr today will amuse young listeners or readers with its novelty," predicted Denise M. Wilms in Booklist.

Other acclaimed works by Bryan include Lion and the Ostrich Chicks, and Other African Folk Tales, The Story

of Lightning and Thunder, Beautiful Blackbird, and Ashley Bryan's ABC of African-American Poetry, the last a children's book that presents a poem for each letter of the alphabet. A retelling of a West African tale, The Story of Lightning and Thunder finds Ma Sheep Thunder and her mischievous son Ram Lightning forced to flee Earth because of the trouble Ram causes, while his Coretta Scott King Book Award-winning Beautiful Blackbird draws its inspiration from Zambian folklore. In the latter picture book, featuring brightly colored collage art, Bryan tells a story about a group of brightly colored African forest birds who decide that the simple but lustrous plumage of Blackbird is the most beautiful of all. Because others wish to be like him, Blackbird dances and flits among the flock, adding dark flecks to feathers and tails, but ultimately explains to his feathered flatterers that inner beauty is more important than outward appearance. "Bryan's lilting and magical language is infectious," noted a Publishers Weekly contributor in reviewing Beautiful Blackbird, while a Kirkus Reviews writer maintained that "rolling language and appealing illustrations make [the book] … a must." Writing that the cut-paper collage pictures "fill the pages with energy," Booklist reviewer Julie Cummins concluded that Beautiful Blackbird is "ready-made for participative storytelling."

Bryan's interest in music reaches back to his childhood, when family and friends sang together on Sunday afternoons. He shares this interest with readers in collections of black American spirituals that include the companion volumes I'm Going to Sing and Walk Together Children as well as All Night, All Day: A Child's First Book of African-American Spirituals, What a Morning: The Christmas Story in Black Spirituals, and Let It Shine: Three Favorite Spirituals. Including "Go Down Moses" and "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" among its twenty-four spirituals, Walk Together Children "is as sweet and varied a collection … as one could hope to find for children," according to New York Times Book Review reviewer Virginia Hamilton. Bryan's accompanying black-and-white illustrations "surge with compassion and raw life," remarked Neil Millar in a review for the Christian Science Monitor.

The award-winning All Night, All Day contains twenty well-known spirituals, along with full piano accompaniment and guitar chords. Bryan pairs his selections with "stylized watercolor paintings" that "flow with the faith and hope of the songs they illustrate," according to School Library Journal contributor Susan Giffard. A critic in Kirkus Reviews described the book's artwork as "visual celebrations rather than literal illustrations, [which] merge the representational with the purely decorative." Let It Shine pairs Bryan's cut-paper collage art with the songs "This Little Light of Mine," "Oh, When the Saints Go Marching In," and "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands," resulting in a work that Barbara Bader praised as "exciting, absorbing, [and] immensely

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moving" in her Horn Book review. Appraising the same collection for School Library Journal, Kathy Piehl added that "Bryan's vibrant illustrations interpret and energize" the three beloved spirituals.

In his interview with Sylvia and Kenneth Marantz, Bryan described his approach to painting: "I work with oils on canvas, outdoors, in the spirit of the impressionists. But I don't work from the essential feeling of light at a specific time; I work from a sense of rhythm." While he preferred to depict seashore scenes early in his career, Bryan has been increasingly fascinated by gardens and other more colorful areas. "I paint from changing patterns of color, as flowers bloom and fade, against the background of the fields stretching down to the ocean," he revealed in the interview. In Beautiful Blackbird Bryan moves from paint to the medium of cut-paper collage. "Throughout the years I have tried many different approaches in illustrating my texts and I felt right from the start that this book, which is an adaptation of a tale from the Ila-speaking people of Zambia, was perfect for collage," he told Sally Lodge in an interview for Publishers Weekly. "It gave me the chance to make each of the birds in the story a single, different color, from head-to-claw."

While Bryan's evening hours are spent creating books, his days are devoted to painting in his studio, located on an island off the coast of Maine. Beginning in the 1940s, Bryan has painted and exhibited his works on this island during the summer, and always harbored the dream of one day living there year round. It became his permanent residence after he retired from his professorship at New England's Dartmouth College.

Since leaving teaching, Bryan has continued to work with groups, enriching lives through storytelling, workshops, and other programs on black culture. As he explained to the Marantz's, "Through my programs in black culture I'm trying to push past the resistances and the stereotypes and open audiences to feelings that can change, or be included in, their lives." Back at home at his studio, he paints the changes nature brings to his island surroundings, and continues to share spirituals and other tales with young readers through his rhythmic retellings and vibrant art. Bryan's willingness to share his creative life with others into his eighth decade continues to be inspirational. As he told Lodge, "I approach everything as if I've just begun. I'm always discovering a new world and always have the urge to keep developing. Each time I finish something, I can't wait to start again and do something even better."

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

Children's Literature Review, Volume 18, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1989.

Contemporary Black Biography, Volume 41, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 2004.

Kingman, Lee, Illustrators of Children's Books, 1967-76, Horn Book (Boston, MA), 1978.

St. James Guide to Children's Writers, 5th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Silvey, Anita, Children's Books and Their Creators, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1995.

PERIODICALS

American Visions, December-January, 1997, Donna Gold, "Ashley Bryan's World—Prize-winning Children's Author, Illustrator, Puppet Maker, and Storyteller Opens up Black Culture for Children," p. 31.

Black Issues Book Review, January-February, 2003, p. 64.

Booklist, April 15, 1985, Denise M. Wilms, "The Cat's Purr," p. 1189; September 1, 1988; October 1, 1989; February 1, 1992; September 1, 1999, Hazel Rochman, review of Jump Back, Honey: The Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar, p. 128; March 15, 2000, Gillian Engberg, review of Salting the Ocean: One Hundred Poems by Young Poets, p. 1378; February 15, 2001, Henrietta M. Smith, review of What a Wonderful World, p. 1161; January 1, 2003, Julie Cummins, review of Beautiful Blackbird, p. 894; March 1, 2004, Jennifer Mattson, review of A Nest Full of Stars: Poems, pp. 1184-1185; November 15, 2006, Randall Enos, review of Let It Shine: Three Favorite Spirituals, p. 50.

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, February, 1990; February, 1999, Janice Del Negro, "True Blue: Ashley Bryan"; February, 2003, review of Beautiful Blackbird, p. 227

Children's Book Review Service, December, 1988; December, 1989.

Christian Science Monitor, November 6, 1974, Neil Millar, "Songs of Lands and Seasons," p. 14; November 3, 1976; August 2, 1985.

Commonweal, November 22, 1974.

Highlights for Children, April, 2003, "Let No One Stop You," p. 20.

Horn Book, February, 1977; April, 1981; February, 1983; May, 1985; March-April, 1988, Sylvia and Kenneth Marantz, interview with Bryan, pp. 173-179; November, 1988, March-April, 1989; January, 1990; May, 1992; March-April, 2003, Barbara Bader, review of Beautiful Blackbird, p. 220; March-April, 2004, Joanna Rudge Long, review of A Nest Full of Stars, pp. 192-193; January-February, 2007, Barbara Bader, review of Let It Shine, p. 80.

Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 1988; April 15, 1991, review of All Night, All Day, p. 534; August 15, 1992; December 1, 2002, review of Beautiful Blackbird, p. 1766; December 15, 2006, review of Let It Shine, p. 1265.

Language Arts, March, 1977; February, 1978; March, 1984, Alice K. Swinger, "Profile: Ashley Bryan," pp. 305-311; October, 1985; May, 2004, Darwin Henderson, "Celebrating Ashley Bryan," pp. 436-439.

Ms., December, 1974.

New York Times Book Review, November 3, 1974, Virginia Hamilton, "Walk Together Children: Black American Spirituals," pp. 28-29; October 10, 1976; December, 1987; January 16, 2000, review of Jump Back, Honey, p. 54.

Publishers Weekly, July 28, 1989; July 6, 1992, p. 53; October 21, 1996, p. 83; November 9, 1998, p. 75; November 8, 1999, review of The Night Has Ears: African Proverbs, p. 66; November 18, 2002, review of Beautiful Blackbird, p. 59; December 9, 2002, Sally Lodge, interview with Bryan, p. 54; March 8, 2004, review of A Nest Full of Stars, p. 74; November 27, 2006, review of Let It Shine, p. 54.

School Library Journal, October, 1989; May, 1991, Susan Giffard, review of All Night, All Day, p. 88; October, 1992; July, 2000, Linda Zoppa, review of Salting the Ocean, p. 120; December, 2000, p. 161; January, 2003, Carol Ann Wilson, review of Beautiful Blackbird, p. 118; March, 2004, Susan Oliver, review of A Nest Full of Stars, p. 190; January, 2007, Kathy Piehl, review of Let It Shine, p. 113.

Washington Post, April 21, 1998, Lonnae O'Neal Parker, "Wagging the Tale Right off the Page."

Washington Post Book World, November 7, 1971; December 12, 1976.

Wilson Library Bulletin, February, 1986.