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Jordan Stratford is a Canadian author of children's fiction.
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Jordan Stratford is a Canadian author of children's fiction.
Jordan is the author of the Wollstonecraft Detective Agency Series (Knopf / Random House), a pro-math and science adventure series for children 8-12. The first book was funded by a Kickstarter campaign that exceeded its target $4000, being promoted on Wired and io9. [1] [2] [3]
The first book in the series, The Case of the Missing Moonstone, sold 40,000 copies worldwide, and was translated into Russian, German and Turkish[ citation needed ]; it was a finalist for the Sheila A. Egoff Children's Literature Prize (part of the British Columbia Book Prizes) [4] and the Silver Birch Award (part of the Forest of Reading, created by the Ontario Library Association). [5] The second novel in the series, The Case of the Girl In Grey, was released in 2016, followed by The Case of the Counterfeit Criminals in 2017, and The Case of the Perilous Palace in 2018. [6]
All of the Wollstonecraft Detective Agency books are illustrated by Kelly Murphy. The title refers to Mary Wollstonecraft, and the protagonists are based on Mary Shelley and Ada Lovelace.
In 2005, Stratford was ordained a gnostic priest in the Apostolic Johannite Church, [7] having received a Licentiate of Sacred Theology from St. Raphael the Archangel Theological Seminary.[ citation needed ] He has written extensively on gnosticism as a modern spiritual practice and on the history of alchemy.
Stratford has also worked as an advertising creative director, filmmaker, screenwriter, instructor at Vancouver Film School and writer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Despite living off an inheritance from his multi-millionaire father, Jordan was intent, and successful, at crowd funding his projects. To date he has gleaned $91,751 from charitable donations. He continues to crowd fund to this day.
Stratford cites poet Robin Skelton as an influence. [8]
Stratford is a father of four children. [7]
Jordan Stratford has been involved in steampunk for many years. He co-founded the Victoria Steam Expo, the first steampunk art exhibition in Canada. [9] Vintage Tomorrows, a documentary about the movement, interviewed him at the 2012 event, which he described as "an interactive art experience" [10] The film quotes him encouraging people to engage with technology, make it, break it, and reinvent it. [11] CNET described his children's series, the Wollstonecraft Detective Agency novels, as steampunk plus Jane Austen. [1]
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, also known as Ada Lovelace, was an English mathematician and writer chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage's proposed mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine. She was the first to recognise that the machine had applications beyond pure calculation.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792), written by British philosopher and women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. In it, Wollstonecraft responds to those educational and political theorists of the eighteenth century who did not believe women should receive a rational education. She argues that women ought to have an education commensurate with their position in society, claiming that women are essential to the nation because they educate its children and because they could be "companions" to their husbands, rather than mere wives. Instead of viewing women as ornaments to society or property to be traded in marriage, Wollstonecraft maintains that they are human beings deserving of the same fundamental rights as men.
Mary Wollstonecraft was a British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. Until the late 20th century, Wollstonecraft's life, which encompassed several unconventional personal relationships, received more attention than her writing. Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and her works as important influences.
Scotland Yard is the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, the territorial police force responsible for policing Greater London's 32 boroughs. Its name derives from the location of the original Metropolitan Police headquarters at 4 Whitehall Place, which had its main public entrance on the Westminster street called Great Scotland Yard. The Scotland Yard entrance became the public entrance, and over time "Scotland Yard" came to be used not only as the common name of the headquarters building, but also as a metonym for the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) itself and police officers, especially detectives, who serve in it. The New York Times wrote in 1964 that, just as Wall Street gave its name to New York's financial district, Scotland Yard became the name for police activity in London.
Steampunk is a subgenre of science fiction that incorporates retrofuturistic technology and aesthetics inspired by, but not limited to, 19th-century industrial steam-powered machinery. Steampunk works are often set in an alternative history of the Victorian era or the American frontier, where steam power remains in mainstream use, or in a fantasy world that similarly employs steam power.
Northanger Abbey is a coming-of-age novel and a satire of Gothic novels written by the English author Jane Austen. Although the title page is dated 1818 and was published posthumously in 1817 with Persuasion, Northanger Abbey was completed in 1803, making it the first of Austen's novels to be completed in full. From a fondness of Gothic novels and an active imagination distorting her worldview, the story follows Catherine Morland, the naïve young protagonist, as she develops to better understand herself and the world around her.
Claire Tomalin is an English journalist and biographer known for her biographies of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft.
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency is a series of novels by Alexander McCall Smith set in Botswana and featuring the character Mma Precious Ramotswe. The series is named after the first novel, published in 1998. Twenty-four novels have been published in the series between 1998 and 2022.
Elaine Pagels, née Hiesey, is an American historian of religion. She is the Harrington Spear Paine Professor of Religion at Princeton University. Pagels has conducted extensive research into early Christianity and Gnosticism.
Since the advent of the cyberpunk genre, a number of cyberpunk derivatives have become recognized in their own right as distinct subgenres in speculative fiction, especially in science fiction. Rather than necessarily sharing the digitally and mechanically focused setting of cyberpunk, these derivatives can display other futuristic, or even retrofuturistic, qualities that are drawn from or analogous to cyberpunk: a world built on one particular technology that is extrapolated to a highly sophisticated level, a gritty transreal urban style, or a particular approach to social themes.
Robin Skelton was a Canadian academic, writer, poet, and anthologist.
Gnosticism in modern times includes a variety of contemporary religious movements, stemming from Gnostic ideas and systems from ancient Roman society. Gnosticism is an ancient name for a variety of religious ideas and systems, originating in Jewish-Christian milieux in the first and second century CE.
Susanna Hall was the oldest child of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway and the older sister of twins Judith and Hamnet Shakespeare. Susanna married John Hall, a local physician, in 1607. They had one daughter, Elizabeth, in 1608. Elizabeth married Thomas Nash, son of Anthony Nash on 22 April 1626 at Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon.
The murders of Eve Stratford and Lynne Weedon, two young women from London, England, occurred in separate, sexually motivated attacks by the same unidentified individual during 1975. Stratford was a bunny girl and Weedon was a schoolgirl who was killed almost six months later, on the other side of London. After Weedon's cold case was re-opened in 2004, new DNA techniques revealed that she and Stratford had been murdered by the same person. Stratford's case was re-opened in 2007, but neither case has been solved. A £40,000 reward for information leading to the killer remains on offer.
Dieselpunk is a retrofuturistic subgenre of science fiction similar to steampunk or cyberpunk that combines the aesthetics of the diesel-based technology of the interwar period through to the 1950s with retro-futuristic technology and postmodern sensibilities. Coined in 2001 by game designer Lewis Pollak to describe his tabletop role-playing game Children of the Sun, the term has since been applied to a variety of visual art, music, motion pictures, fiction, and engineering.
Gail Carriger is an author of steampunk fiction and an American archaeologist. She was born in Bolinas, an unincorporated community in Marin County, California, and attended high school at Marin Academy. She received her undergraduate degree from Oberlin College, a masters of science in archaeological materials at England's University of Nottingham in 2000, and a master of arts in anthropology at the University of California Santa Cruz in 2008. She is a 2010 recipient of the Alex Awards.
Kelly Murphy is an American author, illustrator and educator. She is based in Providence, Rhode Island.
The Screaming Staircase is a young adult, supernatural thriller novel by Jonathan Stroud. It is the first book in the series Lockwood & Co., and was published on 29 August 2013 by Random House in the United Kingdom, and by Disney-Hyperion in the United States on 17 September 2013.
Lockwood & Co. is a young adult supernatural thriller series by Jonathan Stroud. It follows three young operatives of a psychic detection agency as they fight ghosts in London, England.
Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure is an American animated television series developed by Chris Sonnenburg and Shane Prigmore, and produced by Disney Television Animation. It premiered on Disney Channel as a Disney Channel Original Movie titled Tangled: Before Ever After on March 10, 2017. Its regular episodes premiered on March 24, 2017. The series is based on the 2010 film Tangled and features the returning voices of Mandy Moore and Zachary Levi, alongside Eden Espinosa, Clancy Brown, Julie Bowen, James Monroe Iglehart, Jeff Ross, Paul F. Tompkins, and Jeremy Jordan.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)What has been the greatest influence on you with respect to encouraging you to write and become a published author? In my teens, I grew up, effectively, in my girlfriend's house. Her father was Robin Skelton, the poet and professor, who hosted a weekly salon of writers and artists. The university would fly in all kinds of amazing voices from all over, they'd do a reading, we'd go out for dinner and come back to this sprawling Victorian pile and party into the wee small hours, reading each other's poetry. And do it again next week. And I thought, this is it. A life of arts and letters. Gallery crawls every Sunday, readings every Thursday, and scrambling like hell to create something new to share for next week. Never looked back. Why would I?
