unspoiled Africa: November 2012

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Know more about the Faculty

In São Tomé, students will work under the guidance of Shadra Strickand, Instructor, and Alain Corbel, Program administrator of Unspoiled Africa. Know a little bit more about both faculty.

Shadra studied, design, writing, and illustration at Syracuse University and later went on to complete her M.F.A. at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She won the Ezra Jack Keats Award and the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award for New Talent in 2009 for her work in her first picturebook, Bird, written by Zetta Elliott. Strickland co-illustrated Our Children Can Soar, winner of a 2010 NAACP Image Award. Shadra is also the illustrator of A Place Where Hurricanes Happen (Random House, 2010), written by Renee Watson: a story of four children in New Orleans before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina. Publishers Weekly called Strickland’s illustrations “quietly powerful,” and Booklist said, “In vibrant, mixed-media images, award-winning illustrator Strickland extends the drama, feeling, and individual stories.”

Shadra travels the country conducting workshops and sharing her work with children, teachers, and librarians.

Born in 1965 in Brittany, France, Alain studied at St. Lukas in Brussels (comic strip department). Between 1990 and 1994, with Comic creator Eric Lambé, he produced Mokka and Pelure Amère, two modern comic strip magazines that influenced many authors and publishers like Fremok. In 1997 he moved to Lisbon, Portugal, where he lives and works as a comics artist, illustrator and storywriter for book publishers, magazines and newspapers. He has always chosen to live in places for their geographic and poetic qualities. He has always chosen to live in places for their geographic and poetic qualities. Since 2000, he regularly goes to Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, East-Timor, Angola, Mozambique and São Tomé, where he organizes illustration&writing workshops, with some African and Portuguese NGOs.

The Guardian: Seychelles aren't the only idyllic African island

The Seychelles aren't the only idyllic African island. São Tomé and Príncipe makes a more adventurous destination
" Two young guards stood astride the entrance of the presidential palace in São Tomé town, resplendent in white gaiters and BMX-style helmets. They stepped forward in unison, clapped their rifles to their shoulders, caught each other's eye, and collapsed into laughter. They didn't cut very convincing figures as guards, but then military pomp seems a bit superfluous in São Tomé and Príncipe, arguably Africa's most peaceful country.

This twin-island nation tucked in the Gulf of Guinea, off Africa's Atlantic coast, seems to be a secret largely confined to purveyors of cocoa – São Toméan chocolate graces the shelves of Fortnum & Mason – and naturalists, who flock here for its rare birds and butterflies. But any visitor to Africa's second-smallest country would be bewitched by its vivid natural beauty, dilapidated architectural grandeur and disarmingly friendly people.

São Toméans' renowned "ease of being" is enshrined in the local watchword, leve-leve, meaning something like "easy, easy" – which they say when you try to hurry things along. In this informal island culture, more Caribbean than African, where fruit flops off the trees and the sea is jumping with fish, the question always seems to be, "What's the rush?"

Read the entire article written by Daniel Metcalfe from the Guardian, UK.