Marye Gail HarrisonMarye Gail Harrison describes herself a person who caught a lot of breaks in life. Her parents made many sacrifices to offer her opportunities they never knew. She was raised in Baltimore instead of in the small farming town in Tennessee where she wa born. Mentored by exceptional teachers in Catonsville, MD, she went on to get a BA in American Literature at Brown University and an MA in Organizational Behavior at the University of Hartford. None of that foretold her passions for poetry, flowers, cosmology, sketching and painting that would evolve after her early retirement from a financial services career. Yet in 2012 when Antrim House published her first book of poems and illuminations, Full Face To the Light, those interests became clear. As poet Mary Oliver advises, Marye Gail began to pay more attention to both the cosmic news of our universe and everyday events and feelings she experienced. She shifted from sketching from life to painting images from the Hubble Space telescope, and she used that cosmic imagery in her poems. During Covid-19, in an artist support group, she identified her desire to publish what she called a cosmic book of paintings and poetry, which began by recognizing that we are a part of the whole universe, emerging into daily life and finally continuing into the particulars of the pandemic shutdown. As she selected paintings to complement the poetic journey from macro to micro views, she coincidently created a short art retrospective, starting with one of her first paintings from a photo of her father in 1989 and ending with a bouquet of her summer flowers that she painted from life in 2021. Marye Gail, now 80, lives independently at Seabury Life Community in Bloomfield, CT which cultivates all forms of creativity for residents' enjoyment. She has a family of three married children and three grandchildren. The youngest grandchild, now seven years old, is already exploring the moon, stars and earth. Read More Read Less