Bonnie Christensen was an American writer and illustrator. Her award-winning picture books introduced young readers to the early lives of such iconic personalities as Andy Warhol, Elvis Presley and Woody Guthrie.
Background
Bonnie Christensen was born on January 23, 1951, at Saranac Lake, New York, United States. She was the daughter of of Wallace Christensen, a forest economist, and Theo Christensen, a homemaker. The family moved seven times before she was 16.
Education
Bonnie received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Vermont.
Career
After graduation Bonnie moved to Manhattan to work with Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival. While writing plays for small theaters, she took jobs at the Actor’s Studio, the Screen Actors Guild and Paramount Pictures.
After studying with master wood engraver John Depol, Bonnie left theater and immersed herself in printmaking. The first of her more than 20 illustrated books was issued in 1994. It was An Edible Alphabet. The work is an abecedarium, or alphabet book, for primary graders in which each of the twenty-six letters are represented by a food item. An Edible Alphabet, however, is also unusual in that Christensen borrows terms from other languages for the more unusual letters - instead of the usual xylophone or x-ray for the letter X she introduces Xanthorhiza, the term for an edible root used in homeopathic medicine. Her colored woodcut illustrations depict both the item itself and a way in which people might use it. Another work written and illustrated by Christensen is her 1997 picture book Rebus Riot, which contains poems in rebus form. A rebus is a riddle in which the reader must decipher a series of images whose sounds represent a different word or syllable.
Christensen has also provided pictures for several other children's books, including Joseph A. Citro’s Green Mountain Ghosts, Ghouls, and Unsolved Mysteries, published in 1994, and Putting the World to Sleep by Shelley Moore Thomas. For the pages of Stephen Krensky’s Breaking into Print: Before and After the Invention of the Printing Press Christensen created wood engravings and painted borders.
Christensen also taught at two Vermont Colleges, St. Michael’s and Vermont College of Fine Arts. She exhibited her work in local and European galleries, visited schools and worked on the sets of two Hollywood films, “Sweetheart’s Dance” and “The Spitfire Grill.” She wrote and illustrated biographies of some well-known people, including Galileo, Django, Woody Guthrie, Andy Warhol, and Elvis. Paintings from her biography of Andy Warhol were purchased by the Library of Congress.
Bonnie moved to Williston in 2008, lured by Southern warmth and the local arts community. She died there of ovarian cancer on January 12, 2015, aged 63.
Membership
Christensen was a member of Wood Engraver’s Network and New England Letterpress Guild.
Personality
Christensen welcomed a good challenge and excelled at everything she did, whether frying locust blossoms or remodeling her arts and crafts bungalow. Disciplined to a fault, she was fiercely independent and never wanted for ideas. When over 50, she taught herself Italian and learned the violin.