Jeanette Spencer: Biography

The picture you see on this page is a watercolor portrait of Big Red, another Alley Cat Rose Studio Cat. Images of my cats often make appearances in my artwork and my fiction as well as some of my non-fiction. The name of the studio "Alley Cat" is in their honor and the "Rose" came from the beautiful garden outside my studio when I lived in Maryland. Flowers and textiles often appear in my work, too.

It has been my great good fortune to make my living as a full time artist and writer, or writer and artist depending on my mood. My career has been mostly in the area of magazines, but I have written a book, a children's anthology of ten cat stories, Cats, Cats & More Cats (Royal Fireworks Press, 1996). Mary Hanson-Roberts did the adorable cover and I did the inside illustrations for the stories I wrote. Gary Roen secured the contract for the book, handled the agreement negotiations and designed the order of the stories.

My latest book, Wolf Song (U.S. Games) was released October 13, 2000. It was a very lucky Friday the 13th for me! The Wolf Song Deck, the set of absolutely beautiful problem solving cards by Lew Hartman that inspired the book, are already available.

Lew is currently working on a new Tarot which we call "Tarot of the Wild Ones." Once he is finished doing the artwork, I will write the companion book. I have been a Tarot reader since I was fifteen and I won't tell you how long ago that was!

In addition to writing articles, interviews and stories, I am an educational writer as well as a business and procedural writer. If you are interested in this kind of work, and it is a very cool career, there is an organization called the Society of Technical Communicators where you will find all kinds of information. As a "tech writer" I design, write and illustrate everything from articles for magazines and newsletters to guidelines and procedural manuals for businesses and colleges.

One of my current projects is creating a series of electronic manuals using HTML (and a few other goodies!) for Florida Technical College where I started out as a professor of humanities at the Orlando Campus. I didn't do their web pages, Network Administrator Jim Euliano created them. Jim had a lot to do with my education as an emerging webmaster!

I am a graduate of the University of Central Florida. I escaped with a B.A. in Art and one in History as well as an M.A. in History. Okay, I escaped a couple of times. I just finished taking some additional graduate level courses in Technical Writing and HTML webmastering. My academic career started in the graphics department of the University of Maryland which has an excellent program.

My email address is alleycat@worldramp.net. Please don't send attachments since I can't open them. I do try to answer all of my mail but it does take some time since I do work (no complaints about that!) and many of my cats are high maintenance medical cases.

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© Copyright 2003, Jeanette Spencer. Alley Cat Rose Studio of Arts/Alley Cat Rose. All Rights Reserved. Please Note: All art and all text remain the property of the artists and the writers, all rights are reserved by the artists and the writers.