A composer uses sound to try to shape, understand, and express daily pleasures and unanswered questions. Early on Elizabeth Swados describes the core of her introspective as well as highly informative guidance to the musically gifted person who wishes to develop a career as a composer. Swados writes about her subject from the inside out, that is, from the inner necessities to the formal, technical, and practical ones of creating music. In doing so, she often writes directly from her experience as a student, protegee, and hanger-on in the musical world as well as from her subsequent career as an unusually eclectic composer, along with its ancillary roles of conductor, director, teacher and survivor.

Listening out loud: Becoming a composer (The Harper & Row series on the professions)

Arts & Photography

Swados, Elizabeth

Music

Harper&Row

A young child wonders about the skies, fantasizing about the possibility of other life far away in the universe

Skydance

Harpercollins Childrens Books

1988, Harper & Row, NY, hardcover edition, 208 pages. Author Swados is a master class teacher and conducts workshops in composition and performance.

Listening Out Loud: Becoming a Composer

Harpercollins

When Chana Landau leaves her safe, familiar Orthodox Jewish enclave in Brooklyn to teach at Manhattan's Harvey Milk High School, the inexperienced teacher finds a strange, hostile world in which her only support becomes Flamboya+a7nt, a teenage prostitute and accomplished writer. 25,000 first printing.

Flamboyant

Literature & Fiction

United States

Picador USA

When Chana Landau begins her job as a teacher at Harvey Milk High School, she leaves the protection of her traditional Orthodox Jewish enclave in Brooklyn for a school that embodies everything she has been forbidden to experience. In a hostile classroom filled with sexually "different" teens, street kids, and drug addicts, Chana's one support is Flamboyant, a fifteen-year-old prostitute and an accomplished writer. Flamboyant is an unforgettable novel of cultural difference, friendship, and faith.

Flamboyant: A Novel

Picador

Two indifferent music students find themselves in a world made up of musical instruments who need their help to fight against the evil King and Queen of Flats and their plan to eliminate all music

Inside Out: A Musical Adventure

Children's Books

Little,Brown & Co

The moving story of the author's talented family, which is haunted by the tragedy of the first child's schizophrenia. Four essays, one for each family member's story, combine to create a complex and resonant picture of the four sides of a family rectangle.

The Four of Us: The Story of a Family

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Liz Swados sets the stage for a hilarious, cathartic poetry slam, with casting and sets by Joe Cepeda. One summer morning in the sizzling city, seven kids gather on a street corner to share the power of poetry. As they move through the neighborhood, the kids transform their experiences -- standing up to a tough kid, slurping spaghetti and ice cream, a good "hiccup cough sniff" cry -- into a poetry slam celebrating the strength and energy of their own unique voices. Elizabeth Swado's wonderfully aural work is given visual dimension by Joe Cepeda's colorful, character-ful paintings. So come along and heed the call: Hey you! C'MERE!

Hey You! C'mere! A Poetry Slam

Arthur A. Levine Books

Includes sixteen poems about subjects ranging from the weather, to family, to food.

Hey You! C'mere: A Poetry Slam

Classics

Arthur A. Levine

Details the emotional rift that divides an American family battling with mental illness, in four essays that show each member's story

The Four of Us: A Family Memoir

Regional U.S.

Plume

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Books by Swados, Elizabeth