An independent writer since 1973, Jeanne Schinto worked for more than 17 years as a reporter for Maine Antique Digest (a national magazine despite its name, dubbed by its devoted readers the “Bible of the trade”) — writing about auctions, covering antiques shows, reviewing museum and gallery exhibitions in Greater Boston, New York City, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, and spotting market trends. She has written literally several hundred pieces for M.A.D., on such subjects as a cache of Diane Arbus photos found in a storage locker, on the sale of the original manuscript of Alcoholics Anonymous and the lawsuit that nearly prevented it, on the first decade of PBS’s Antiques Roadshow, on the birth and evolution of the African Americana market, and on the same for the market for African American fine art, on a Tiffany vase stolen from Boston's Ayer Mansion, on the graffiti-art collection of Boston attorney John Axelrod — and that’s only a short sampling of the ones filed under the letter “A.” Her essays about collectors and collecting have been published in a wide variety of other magazines, too, including The Atlantic Monthly, Gastronomica, Fine Art Connoisseur, Boston Magazine, and Yankee, as well as a number of literary journals, including The Virginia Quarterly Review, Southwest Review, and The Michigan Quarterly Review.
Before she began at M.A.D., she was for six years a regular contributor to one of the largest alternative newspapers in the country, the San Diego Reader. For the Reader, she wrote extensive feature profiles (10,000 to 20,000 words) about a neurologist, a marine artist, an experimental composer, and major pieces of the same length about computer hackers, audiophiles, World War II POWs, and birders. For her short (1000-word), weekly column, which she produced for four and a half years, she interviewed dozens of people in virtually all fields of endeavor, from Edward O. Wilson and Tammy Faye Bakker to Tony Hawk and Edward Gorey’s literary executor, Andreas Brown, as well as numerous lesser-knowns, from graphic novelists to Australian Rules footballers to residents of a Zen Buddhist monastery. The territory ranged from the northernmost point of San Diego County all the way south to Tijuana.
Born in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1951, Ms. Schinto has degrees from George Washington University (B.A., journalism and American studies) and Johns Hopkins (M.A., creative writing). She has been a MacDowell Colony fellow, the recipient of a research support grant from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and a creative writing fellow at the American Antiquarian Society.
The author of three books, including Huddle Fever: Living in the Immigrant City (Knopf, 1995), Ms. Schinto has recently completed Black Tulip, White Glove, a book of her essays and reportage on collectors, collecting, and collections. She is currently working on a new long-term project, a history of the nineteenth-century Christian missionary movement that originated in part with the theologians, Bible scholars, preachers, teachers, translators, printers, and ordinary townspeople of Andover, Massachusetts, where she lives today with her husband, horologist Bob Frishman. Its working title is The Missionary Factory. A tennis player, Ms. Schinto has competed at the 4.0 USTA level in singles; a hiker, she has been to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and the top of Yosemite Falls; a traveler, she has toured Tasmania's Bruny Island and Japan's Kunisaki Peninsula. She has many more places to go.
Before she began at M.A.D., she was for six years a regular contributor to one of the largest alternative newspapers in the country, the San Diego Reader. For the Reader, she wrote extensive feature profiles (10,000 to 20,000 words) about a neurologist, a marine artist, an experimental composer, and major pieces of the same length about computer hackers, audiophiles, World War II POWs, and birders. For her short (1000-word), weekly column, which she produced for four and a half years, she interviewed dozens of people in virtually all fields of endeavor, from Edward O. Wilson and Tammy Faye Bakker to Tony Hawk and Edward Gorey’s literary executor, Andreas Brown, as well as numerous lesser-knowns, from graphic novelists to Australian Rules footballers to residents of a Zen Buddhist monastery. The territory ranged from the northernmost point of San Diego County all the way south to Tijuana.
Born in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1951, Ms. Schinto has degrees from George Washington University (B.A., journalism and American studies) and Johns Hopkins (M.A., creative writing). She has been a MacDowell Colony fellow, the recipient of a research support grant from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and a creative writing fellow at the American Antiquarian Society.
The author of three books, including Huddle Fever: Living in the Immigrant City (Knopf, 1995), Ms. Schinto has recently completed Black Tulip, White Glove, a book of her essays and reportage on collectors, collecting, and collections. She is currently working on a new long-term project, a history of the nineteenth-century Christian missionary movement that originated in part with the theologians, Bible scholars, preachers, teachers, translators, printers, and ordinary townspeople of Andover, Massachusetts, where she lives today with her husband, horologist Bob Frishman. Its working title is The Missionary Factory. A tennis player, Ms. Schinto has competed at the 4.0 USTA level in singles; a hiker, she has been to the bottom of the Grand Canyon and the top of Yosemite Falls; a traveler, she has toured Tasmania's Bruny Island and Japan's Kunisaki Peninsula. She has many more places to go.