Stitched Together

Shelley Jackson is the illustrator of The Chicken-Chasing Queen of Lamar County, written by Janice N. Harrington, winner of the 2007 Cybils Award in the Picture Book category. The judges' citation for that book says:

The illustrations are a perfect match in spirit, and they move the tale along with equal verve, using the rich texture of collage, skilled brush strokes, celebratory colors and charming whimsy.

FSG's webpage for Jackson says she's "the author-illustrator of several picture books and author of adult fiction. She lives in Brooklyn, New York."

Shelley Jackson is the ground-breaking author of the hypertext novel Patchwork Girl, published in 1995. It takes off of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and L. Frank Baum's Patchwork Girl of Oz.

After that, Jackson published a novel called SKIN through the tattoos of volunteer pages, as well as a conventionally printed books The Melancholy of Anatomy and Half Life. Having earned a degree in fine art, Jackson has also illustrated some books, including Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link, and her own picture books Sophia: The Alchemist's Cat and The Old Woman and the Wave. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

The second Shelley Jackson maintains a website called Ineradicable Stain, which includes a rundown of other Shell(e)y Jacksons. Though two Shelley Jacksons who are Brooklyn-based novelists and illustrators would surely get mixed up a lot, this list pointedly does not include the first Shelley Jackson.

All this makes perfect sense given how a recurring theme of the second Shelley Jackson's work is the rending and rendering of human identity and the human body. And it also shows how good the Cybils are at identifying talent.