Surrealism

One of the very few Americans welcomed into the Surrealist Movement in Paris by André Breton himself, Penelope Rosemont is a poet, essayist, and visual artist. In the 1960s, in addition to being members of the Industrial Workers of the World and Students for a Democratic Society, she and her late husband Franklin Rosemont co-founded the Chicago Surrealist Group, which published the magazine Arsenal/Surrealist Subversion and the book imprint Black Swan Press. In the 1980s, she became one of the directors of Chicago's historic left-wing press Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company. She has co-edited several surrealist publications, including Free Spirits: Annals of the Insurgent Imagination (City Lights 1982) and The Forecast is Hot! Tracts & Other Collective Declarations of the Surrealist Movement in the United States (Black Swan 1997), and is the editor of the landmark collection Surrealist Women: An International Anthology (Texas 1998). Her writings include two poetry collections Athanor (Black Swan 1971) and Beware of the Ice (Surrealist Editions 1992), the essay collection Surrealist Experiences (Black Swan 1999), and the memoir Dreams & Everyday Life (Charles Kerr 2008). She has participated in many international exhibitions of surrealism.