This book is presents Alexandra York’s passions and eloquence in a new compilation of her work, encompassing the wide range of her visions and the variety of forms in which she has written. The 23 poems and 13 lyrics and songs (featuring pull-out sheet music!) are distilled versions of her deep and sensitive thoughts. The large body of prose—31 offerings--includes everything from short fiction, myth and a children’s book to articles on art and politics (and cars!) to art exhibit catalogue essays to excerpts from beauty books and four novels. Some of the works have been published in various venues; some make their debut here, but within these pages we witness the transition from performer to creator and from intellectual to intimate explorations. The variety of her work is fascinating but the consistency of her mind—the unity within the variety—is even more compelling, for everything she writes expresses her undying allegiance to her core value system and an adventurous tenacity to probe the burning issues of our time and place as a culture.

“I wrote throughout my youth the way I breathed, giving it no serious thought and certainly never imagining a future career in that field. I was going into the theater. Having been trained in ballet, piano, drama and voice, starting with dance at age three and the other arts as time went on, and performing from age seven, the New York stage was my goal. . . But then a strange thing happened. I didn’t want to perform any more. All I wanted to do was write. Now I’m at the mid-point of my writing career. Poems and songs will keep coming, and my next novel will include both because my hero is a composer.”

So York, herself, describes the merger of all of her talents into a single career with many facets that, like a well cut gem, shines from many angles. Ideas and values are central to all of her work, but a compassionate sincerity of feeling permeates each and every creation, whatever its subject or form. She strives for a rebirth of beauty and life-affirming values in the fine arts by championing the work of other artists through American Renaissance for the Twenty-first Century, her educational nonprofit foundation [www.ART-21.org]. Her own writing is an integral part of her larger mission, contributing directly and indirectly to cultural enrichment through the power of art to communicate high ideals actualized in real life. Whether celebrating love and joy or empathizing with loss and pain, her themes, always contemplative and motivational, inspire readers not only to find pleasure and meaning in her work but also to challenge the cynical concepts of the sensationalist, nihilistic, popular anti-culture in which we now live and to choose a path of individualism, integrity and pursuit of the best.

Full of beauty and well-studied thoughts as well as lighthearted fun, whimsy and entertainment, OVER THE YEARS, like its author, is one of a kind: a rare combination of an independent mind, a romantic soul, a free spirit and an original voice.