Jerelle Kraus

Early life

Jerelle Kraus was born in Southern California to Joyce Kraus and Dr. Otto Kraus. Ms. Kraus taught at the Edison School, Berkeley, and Mr. Kraus was an emeritus professor of philosophy at University of California Los Angeles. Jerelle attended Pomona College, was a sophomore exchange student at Swarthmore College, received a certificate from École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, a BA and an MA in art from the University of California at Berkley, and was a Fulbright scholar in Munich.

Art direction

While living in San Francisco, Kraus was the art director of Ramparts Magazine and the founding creative director of Francis Ford Coppola's City Magazine.

In 1977, Kraus began her tenure at The New York Times. She was the first art director of the Living section. She began at the op-ed section in 1979. At Op-Ed, Kraus commissioned many illustrations from well-known artists, including Ralph Steadman, Roland Topor, Maurice Sendak. Kraus spent 30 years at The New York Times, 13 of them at op-ed.

Freelance writing

In addition to her work as an art director, Kraus has been published as a freelance writer. In 1978, Kraus published Museum Mammoth Is a Metamporph on the cover of the New York Times Metropolitan section. The article featured Gerry Lynas, a New York sculptor, building two large-scale ice sculptures—one of a Wooly Mammoth and one of a Stegosaurus—in front of the American Museum of Natural History.

In 1998, Kraus had several pieces published following the death of graphic artist and novelist Roland Topor. The Endpaper of the New York Times Magazine published an obituary and Tina Brown of The New Yorker commissioned an article entitled "Many Muses."

In 2001, she wrote an article for the travel section of the New York Times entitled "Charmed by Morocco in a Wink."

In 2003, she subbed in for William Safire's New York Times column On Language and wrote "Fancifying," a piece about Americans' desire to use highbrow language and how this often results in incorrect usage.

In 2011, Kraus published two book reviews in USA Today. The first was a review of Laurence Bergreen's book Columbus: the Four Voyages. The second, a review of Tolstoy: A Russian Life by Rosamund Bartlett, was published as one of four reviews of biographies of major novelists.

Kraus' book All the Art That's Fit to Print (And Some that Wasn't): Inside the New York Times Op-Ed Page was published by the Columbia University Press in 2009. It tells the history of The New York Times op-ed section. It is used as a text book for journalism and illustration courses at the university level.

The book received critical acclaim from The Washington Post, Bill Maher and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Current life

Kraus lives in New York City where she works as a freelance writer and teaches as an adjunct professor at Fordham University. She is a blogger for The Huffington Post where she published a revised excerpt from her book entitled My Morning with Nixon.