Graphic Classics Volume 18: Louisa May Alcott

Trina Robbins grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Her mother, a second-grade schoolteacher, taught her to read at age four. She says, "It is the greatest gift anyone has ever given to me." Robbins turned her love of books into a lifelong career. For more than 30 years, she has been writing graphic novels and children's books. Her work includes comics such as Wonder Woman and Powerpuff Girls, as well as GoGirl!, her own graphic novel series for girls.

Antonella Caputo is the creative director at Team Sputnik Visual, a graphic design studio based in Lancaster, UK. Being a creative person herself, she knows how slippery the creative process can be. She designed this journal as an aid to creative people everywhere.

Louisa May Alcott was born in 1832 in Germantown, Pennsylvania, but grew up in Concord, Massachusetts. Educated by her father, the Transcendentalist thinker Bronson Alcott, she was influenced by the prominent men of his circle. Emerson, Hawthorne, Parker and Thoreau. The family was usually short of money, and she worked at various tasks from sewing to writing to help to support it. The Civil War broke out in 1861, and in 1862 she began to work as a volunteer army nurse in a Union Hospital. Out of this came her first book, Hospital Sketches (1863); she went on to write several Gothic romances and thrillers. With the publication of Little Women, her first full-length novel for girls, Alcott leapt from being an obscure, struggling New England writer to becoming the best-selling American author of the century. However, she suffered from ill health aggravated by early deprivation and overwork. Alcott died in Boston in 1888.

Anne Timmons is a Portland-based painter and illustrator whose work has appeared in a range of national magazines. In addition to teaming up with Trina Robbins on illustrated biographies and adaptations, she has worked with Paul Buhle on Studs Terkel's Working and Bohemians.

Mary Fleener lives in Encinitas, CA, with her husband.

Lisa K. Weber makes art for comics, kid's books, and cartoons. Her work has included graphic-novel adaptations of classic literature, illustrated books for young and middle-grade readers, and character and storyboard design for animations. She cofounded the comic book label HexComix in 2014, cocreating and illustrating its flagship title, Hex11, which earned a nomination for the Dwayne McDuffie Award for Diversity in Comics. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, raised in Wilmette, Illinois, and schooled in New York City, Lisa currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California, where she enjoys healthy doses of satire, science fiction, and classic-rock radio.