STOCKING STUFFER
Christmas came early to Sangamon County Circuit Clerk Tony Libri and his wife,
Ann. On Dec. 16, at 9:58 a.m., Santa delivered the Libris a tiny bundle — 7-pounds,
15-ounces, to be exact — named Isabella Noel.
Mom and baby are doing great; Tony’s ecstatic. He recites his new daughter’s
melodic name with a distinctly Italian lilt, and frets that she may grow up
to blunt it by marrying a man with a flat last name like Tucker.
“Nothing against Tucker — it’s a fine name,” he says. “But Isabella Noel Tucker?”
Ah, no worries; she can always do like a lot of smart ladies and just hang on
to her lovely maiden name.
PICK-UP LINE
Kudos to our favorite freelance photographer, Ginny Lee, whose eye
for poignant pickup trucks got her on the cover of Larry Brown’s critically-acclaimed
new novel, Joe.
Many months ago, while driving from Springfield to Petersburg, Lee explored
a back road and found an old Chevy, parked behind Lymon Lyons’s barn. She asked
permission from Lyons, who was “fiddling around on the tractor in his shed,”
to take a portrait of the pickup.
Later, Lee included that print in a package she sent Algonquin Books, a firm
she picked because of its reputation for publishing fiction by writers who live
in the Southeast (Lee spends a significant amount of time in Georgia). She forgot
about the submission until a few weeks ago, when the Algonquin art director
called to tell her about Joe. “I met Larry Brown 12 years ago at a convention,”
she says. “So this is synchronicity at work!”
She’s now planning to send samples of her work to other publishers, in her
“spare time.”
This article appears in Dec 18-24, 2003.
