Bio:Celeste Newbrough

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Celeste Newbrough was born in New Orleans, the daughter of Southern representation painter, Norita Massicot Newbrough, and great-niece of spiritualist author John Ballou Newbrough. She lives in Berkeley, California.

Newbrough’s work includes a novel, The Zanscripts, and a book of poems, Pagan Psalms, both published by Onecraft in Berkeley. Poems from Pagan Psalms have been translated into European anthologies and used for both liturgical readings and rituals. The San Francisco Bay Times described the book as “tribal and exalted.” It was cited in Radical Ecology by Carolyn Merchant as a source work in environmental spirituality.

The Zanscripts has been collected in the Shields Library of the University of California, Davis, And elsewhere. Here poems and artwork have been anthologized in Woman Visions, Tit; An Anthology of New England Women’s Art and Writing, The Carquinez Review, The Harrington Fiction Quarterly, Broadway West Press Picks: The Best of the Millennium., Her, Exit-76, and The Wilderness Sampler.

Newbrough was featured poet at the 1990 Conference on Ecofeminism held at the University of California in Berkeley and have read at other conferences and events in San Francisco, Hanover, New Orleans, San Antonio, Philadelphia, and Seattle.

Her nonfiction works have been published, quoted, and cited in numerous publications, including the Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women, International Archives of the Second Wave, Matrix, Distaff, and the New Orleans Times Picayune, and San Francisco Bay Times.

“My work is a search for revelation. My life is a multimedia stream of perceptions and ideas with a strong undercurrent of meaning. It’s great, but I crave the waters of a deeper, purer stream, where the light and shadow of my experiences takes form through my own act of creation. Through my visual art and writing I discover, thus reinvent, what is real.”