PHOEBE GLOECKNER

Associate Professor, School of Art & Design

Contact

Email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
Office: 2070 AA
Phone: (734) 936-2265
Personal Website

Curriculum Vitae

M.A. (Biomedical Communications), University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, 1988
Undergraduate work at San Francisco State University, Charles University in Prague, and L’Université D’Aix-Marseille, 1980-1985

Biography

Phoebe Gloeckner is perhaps best known for her 2002 illustrated novel, "The Diary of a Teenage Girl." Based in part upon entries from her own adolescent journals, "The Diary" takes an unflinching look at the harrowing, unsupervised life of a young girl growing up on the San Francisco streets of the 1970s. Peggy Orenstein wrote in The New York Times that Gloeckner's stories "describe an adolescence that is at once traumatic and picaresque. They explore the power a girl feels in her emerging sexuality as well as the damage inflicted by those who prey upon it. In the process, they raise unsettling questions about vulnerability, desire and the nature of a young woman's victimization."

In a career spanning 25 years, Gloeckner's work has appeared in dozens of publications, and has often stirred controversy. Shipments of her books have been denied entry at various times by French, British, and Canadian border officials. Printers have refused to print her stories, and her first book, A Child's Life and Other Stories, was curiously labeled "a handbook for pedophiles" by a California politician, and subsequently removed from library shelves.

Notwithstanding these obstacles, her books have been translated and published internationally. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and museums across the United States and Europe.

Gloeckner is currently working on an examination of the unsolved murders of hundreds of young women along the Texas-Mexico border over the past 11 years.

Visit PLAY to see a video interview with Phoebe Gloeckner from The Why Series: Why We Make Creative Work.