Penelope Rosemont

Penelope Rosemont
Penelope Rosemont signing at Chicago's Women and Children First, 2007.

Penelope Rosemont (born 1942 in Chicago, Illinois), attended Lake Forest College. She has been a painter, photographer, collagist (having invented a number of surrealist collage methods including the "landscapade" and "insect music" [in which cut-out shapes are placed on the background of a musical score].) and writer, and "graphic designer for [Arsenal/Surrealist Subversions] and other publications," Her painting The Night Time is the Right Time "was selected by the Chicago Jazz Institute for the 2000 Chicago Jazz Festival t-shirt".

Rosemont is the editor of Surrealist Women: An International Anthology (University of Texas, 1998) and The Story of Mary Maclane & Other Writings by Mary Maclane. She is the author of Surrealist Experiences: 1001 Dawns, 221 Midnights (Black Swan Press, 2000), and books of poetry, including Beware of the Ice, and Athanor (1971). She wrote a forward to Crime & Criminals: Address to the Prisoners in the Cook County Jail & Other Writings on Crime by Clarence Darrow. In 2008 her memoir came out, Dreams & Everyday Life, André Breton, Surrealism, Rebel Worker, SDS & the Seven Cities of Cibola. A collection of true stories of Chicago, Armitage Avenue Transcendentalists edited by Rosemont and Janina Ciezadlo came out in 2009.

In 1983 she and her husband Franklin Rosemont became directors of Charles H. Kerr & Company, a publisher of books on history and radical history in Chicago

The Alternatives in Publication Task Force of the Social Responsibilities Round Table of the American Library Association awarded the Rosemonts and Carlos Cortez the 2001 Jackie Eubanks Memorial Award "recogniz[ing] outstanding achievement in promoting the acquisition and use of alternative materials in libraries."