Edna Brush Perkins

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, on March 25, 1880, she was the eldest daughter of inventor Charles F. Brush and Mary Morris Brush. She was educated at Hathaway Brown, studied in Boston, and later took courses at the Women's College of Western Reserve. Over the years, she became active in civic and reform work, helping lead the woman suffrage movement in Cleveland and taking part in a number of local charitable and cultural organizations.

She also built a creative life across several fields. In addition to writing poetry and travel books, she was a pianist and later trained as a painter, studying at the Cleveland School of Art and in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her paintings were exhibited in Cleveland and elsewhere in the late 1920s, and she maintained studios in Provincetown and New York City.

Readers today often know her for her desert writing, especially The White Heart of Mojave (1922), drawn from her travels in the American West. She died on October 11, 1930, leaving behind a body of work that blends literary curiosity, public-minded energy, and a real feel for landscape.