Angelica Shirley Carpenter grew up a self-proclaimed Oz nut in a family of readers. For fifteen years she was director of the Palm Springs Public Library in Palm Beach County, Florida. With her mother, Jean Shirley, she began writing biographies of authors: Frances Hodgson Burnett: Beyond the Secret Garden, L. Frank Baum: Royal Historian of Oz, and Robert Louis Stevenson: Finding Treasure Island. After her mother died in 1995, Angelica continued writing on her own, publishing Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking Glass (all books thus far are from Lerner Publications) and editing a book for adults, In the Garden: Essays in Honor of Frances Hodgson Burnett (Scarecrow Press).
In 1999 Angelica became founding curator at the Arne Nixon Center for the Study of Children’s Literature at California State University, Fresno. There she put on conferences for the Children’s Literature Association, the International Wizard of Oz Club, the Beatrix Potter Society, the Lewis Carroll Society of North America, the United States Board on Books for Young People, and the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. She is a past president of the International Wizard of Oz Club.
Her new biography, coming in September 2018, is Born Criminal: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Radical Suffragist (South Dakota Historical Society Press). Matilda Joslyn Gage, a famous national leader in the early women’s movement, lived in Fayetteville, New York, but her four children moved to Dakota Territory, and sometimes Matilda lived there, too. The 2018 publication of Born Criminal celebrates the centennial of women’s suffrage in South Dakota.
In 2020, the United States will mark the centennial of national women’s suffrage. The South Dakota Historical Society Press will note this anniversary by publishing Angelica’s first picture book, The Voice of Liberty. It describes a protest staged by Matilda Joslyn Gage and other feminists at the dedication of the Statue of Liberty. Why, they asked in 1886, is Liberty portrayed as a woman when women have no freedom in this country?
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