In August of 2018, I posted an article titled “The Ordinary/Extraordinary May Stevens” about the life and work of Ms. Stevens.
I recently learned that she had died at the age of 95 in December of 2019. According to a long obituary in The New York Times, she died of Alzheimer’s disease after a long stay in an assisted-living and memory loss facility in Santa Fe, New Mexico. As I hope that I was able to convey in my article, Stevens deserves to be far better known and her work explored for its beauty and its wisdom. While I was writing that essay, I came to think that Stevens was a kindred spirit to the Hard Crackers project. She once said to an interviewer: “When we think back to the past and our ancestry–historically where people have come from–we always think of the knights and ladies, and not necessarily those who tilled the soil and turned the earth, which is where most of us come from.” May Stevens is now part of our ancestry as well.