Deena Stryker

Deena Stryker (formerly Deena Boyer) has published several books, in France and Italy, where she lived for many years, as well as in the U.S. She returned to her native Philadelphia in 2000 and has blogged at www.otherjones.com.

Her first book was "The Two Hundred Days of 8 1/2", published by MacMillan, Rororo, and Ediciones ERA in 1964 and republished by Garland in 1978. It follows Federico Fellini's creative process from day one to final editing of the film "8 1/2". Excerpts from this book constitute the narrative thread of the Criterion DVD of the film. It is currently out of print.

In 1963, Deena Boyer took advantage of her dual American/French citizenship to travel to Cuba and write the first Western feature on the revolution that was not derogatory. Published in the French weekly Paris-Match and in the Italian Settimo Giorno, these features earned Boyer an invitation to return, and privileged access to the leadership of the Cuban Revolution. Her book "When the Revolution Was Young" was not published until 2004, and was almost immediately put out of print. It features about 100 photos from the archive that was purchased by Duke University in 2008 and which can be seen on-line at http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/stryker. It was published as an e-book, augmented with notes and pictures from Deena Stryker's participation in the 2011 Havana Book Fair for its Italian edition, published by Zambon under the title "Giovane Cuba".

In the late sixties Deena Stryker spent six years behind the Iron Curtain, living and working in Poland and Hungary. That experience, which was followed by a decade in the U.S., where she studied Global Survival and Future Studies at U Mass at Amherst, led, in the eighties to the publication in France of "Une Autre Europe, Un Autre Monde", supported by the Centre National du Livre. In this work she explored the relationship of Western Europe to the United States, and proposed a process for reunification with Eastern Europe. The book also foresaw the dissolution of the Soviet Union, as well as the current trend in Turkish foreign policy toward greater involvement with the Muslim world.

After returning to the U.S. in 2000, Stryker wrote "The Case for Sacredness: A Cultural transformation from Linear to Circular thinking", revising it under the title "A Taoist Politics: The Case for Sacredness". This work uses the common features of oriental wisdom and the new physics and biology to propose a politics that would contribute to a sustainable world.

Deena Stryker's memoir: "Lunch with Fellini, Dinner with Fidel", begins with a Philadelphia teenager's move to postwar France and chronicles the events behind the preceding books, including her stint as speech writer in the Carter State Department, and the raising of two children.

Stryker published a collection of short stories, titled "Lovers and Others", a political essay titled "America Revealed to a Honey-Colored World", and is seeking a publisher to re-issue "The Two Hundred Days of *1/2", a unique document.