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Chandler O'Leary

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Editor’s note: Chandler passed away in April 2023. Below is the biography on the site as she last left it. I am an illustrator, letterer(erer) and entrepreneur living and working in the Pacific Northwest. I graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), and I started my one-woman business in 2004. I was born 50 miles west of Wall Drug, grew up on Cape Cod, spent a year in Rome, and have crept more or less westward ever since. Now I’ve settled in Washington State with my husband and son, in a century-old Craftsman house overlooking the Salish Sea. It sits within the traditional homelands of the Puyallup people, who have lived and worked here for millennia—they know this area as caləłali in the txwəlšucid (Twulshootseed) language. On summer nights the light from a pair of lighthouses blinks through my bedroom window, and from my studio I can hear gulls crying and sea lions barking—my favorite sounds in the world. I spend my days drawing pictures and every free moment criss-crossing the continent on winding back roads. In addition to doing illustration and lettering for clients, I spend a lot of my time on personal side projects, like the prints and stationery I create under my house brand, Anagram Press. I also post my sketchbook drawings and road-trip-themed artwork on my illustrated travel blog, Drawn the Road Again. And I am one half of the team behind the Dead Feminists series, and our first book, published in 2016 by Sasquatch Books, won a Pacific Northwest Book Award. My second book, The Best Coast: A Road Trip Atlas, was published 2019 with a companion book of postcards that followed in 2020. My newest book, On Island Time, arrives in February 2023 from Sasquatch Books, and an illustrated compendium of the Salish Sea is coming in 2025.