Everytime a Knot Is Undone, a God Is Released

Barbara Chase-Riboud is a distinguished poet and winner of the Carl Sandburg Poetry Prize for Best American Poet awarded by the prestigious Daniel Webster Platform Association for her second book of poetry, Portrait of a Nude Women as Cleopatra in 1988. She received a knighthood in Arts and Letters from the French government in 1996, the same year as poet Seamus Heaney. Well-known as a world-class sculptor, she has had personal exhibitions in museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art Paris, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Walters Museum and has exhibited in museums like The British Museum, London, MOMA New York, The Whitney Museum, New York, Centre George Pompidou, Paris, The Smithsonian, Washington D.C. and The Ontario National Gallery. Chase-Riboud has read her poetry in Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Mali, Ghana, Senegal, France, Germany, and the United States. She was the first American woman and first American artist to visit Mainland China after the revolution in 1965. The Philadelphia Museum of Art has mounted a major exhibition of her sculpture and drawings from 1970 to the present which opened in 2013 and moved to Berkeley Museum of Art in 2014. A prolific writer, Chase-Riboud has published six historical novels, several of them prize-winning best sellers including the iconic Sally Hemings for which she received the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Best Novel written an American woman in 1979. She received the American Library Association’s Black Caucus Award for Best Fiction for Hottentot Venus in 2004. In 2005, she received the College Art Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award for her body of work as an American sculptor. A recipient of many fellowships and honorary doctorates, she is a graduate of Yale University and lives in Paris, Rome, and New York.