Joanne de Longchamps Papers

Joanne Cutten de Longchamps was born in Los Angeles in 1923 and attended schools in Los Angeles and Paris where she studied painting and music. She was encouraged to pursue her artistic and literary talents by her mother, Ruth Avery Cutten, herself a drama coach and producer. In 1941, when Joanne was 18, she married Galen De Longchamps, the adopted son of prominent Nevada architect Frederic Delongchamps. The couple moved to Reno, Nevada where they lived for the rest of their lives. In 1949 they had their only son, Dare. She later changed the spelling of her last name.

From an early age, poetry dominated de Longchamps' life. She wrote her first poem at the age of 5; her poems were regularly published in her school newspaper. She took poetry seriously and was persistent in her efforts to publish her work, eventually having her poems featured in more than 300 magazines and producing seven volumes of poetry. She won the Reynold's Lyric Award (1954) for her poem “R.S.V.P.”, the Carolina Quarterly Award, and the Nevada Governor's Art Award for Literature in 1983. In 1989, she was inducted in the University of Nevada, Reno’s Nevada Writer's Hall of Fame.

In the 1950s, de Longchamps began exploring the medium of collage as a way of adding a visual element to her poetry. She audited virtually every course offered by the Art Department at the University of Nevada, Reno and became involved with both campus and community galleries. Joanne de Longchamps accumulated several awards for her artwork, which was exhibited throughout Nevada and northern California.

Thematically, both de Longchamps' poetry and art embrace the natural and animal world, and after moving to Reno her poems focus on a distinctly Nevadan landscape. She loved the air, open spaces, and light of Nevada and imbedded in her poems and collages are images of stones, insects, mountains, animals, and the colors and sounds of the high desert.

Beginning in 1962 and continuing intermittently for the next decade, de Longchamps taught poetry at the University of Nevada, Reno; in 1973 she was appointed the first Walter Van Tilburg Clark Chair in Creative Writing. Throughout her career, she continued to attend poetry workshops, give readings, and lecture to clubs and student groups on the subject of poetry.

De Longchamps is listed in Who's Who in Poetry; World Who's Who of Women; Who's Who of American Women; Writer's Directory; Directory of American Poets; Dictionary of International Biography; and Contemporary Authors. Shortly before her death in 1983, she received an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the University of Nevada, Reno.