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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 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.
Steampunk is a subgenre of science fiction that incorporates retrofuturistic technology and aesthetics inspired by 19th-century industrial steam-powered machinery. Steampunk works are often set in an alternative history of the Victorian era or the American "Wild West", where steam power remains in mainstream use, or in a fantasy world that similarly employs steam power.
Crossing Jordan is an American crime drama television series created by Tim Kring, that aired on NBC from September 24, 2001, to May 16, 2007. It stars Jill Hennessy as Dr. Jordan Cavanaugh, a crime-solving forensic pathologist employed in the Massachusetts Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. In addition to Jordan, the show followed an ensemble cast composed of Jordan's co-workers and police detectives assigned to the various cases.
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-three 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.
Ladybird Books is a London-based publishing company, trading as a stand-alone imprint within the Penguin Group of companies. The Ladybird imprint publishes mass-market children's books.
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.
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency is the first detective novel in the eponymous series by Scottish author Alexander McCall Smith, first published in 1998. The novel introduces the Motswana Mma Precious Ramotswe, who begins the first detective agency in Botswana, in the capital city Gaborone, after her beloved father dies. She hires a secretary and solves cases for her clients.
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.
Eve Stratford and Lynne Weedon were murdered in separate, sexually motivated attacks during 1975 in London, England. Stratford was a bunny girl and model. 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 capture of the killer remains on offer.
Abrams, formerly Harry N. Abrams, Inc. (HNA), is an American publisher of art and illustrated books, children's books, and stationery.
Gail Carriger is the pen name of Tofa Borregaard, 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 released 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 written by Jonathan Stroud. The series follows three young operatives of a psychic detection agency as they fight ghosts in London, England.
Claire Benedict is a British actress known for her work in classical productions on the British stage, but best known for portraying the principal character Mma Ramotswe in the continuing radio adaptations of The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. She won a Time Out Award for Best Performance for her portrayal of Sophia Adams in Errol John's Moon on a Rainbow Shawl, directed by Maya Angelou. She lives in Todmorden in the Pennines.
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.
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?
