The people on the shelf

Nava Atlas has published some twenty trade books that span the culinary and visually driven nonfiction genres. She’s the creator and editor of LiteraryLadiesGuide.com, a platform that explores and archives women’s classic literature with a dedicated following and millions of views logged. She’s also well known for groundbreaking vegan cookbooks — more about her life in the plant-based space is at TheVeganAtlas.com. Her two Substack newsletters, Literary Ladies Guide and The Vegan Atlas, bring both worlds to more than 10,000 readers by email every week.

Nava is also a text-based artist whose limited-edition artist’s books — collected at navaatlasart.com — are represented in dozens of university special collections and the libraries of museums, including the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Boston Museum of Fine Art. A permanent archive of her papers is housed at the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University.

My work over the past few years has its roots in the expression I discovered in nature’s grapevines and their complex tendrils. These found materials became triggers for a series of small sculptural compositions followed by color digital images utilizing these sculptures. These works have also been the basis for my collaborative dance projects, exploring movement and expression. In 2020 I began to incorporate large scale paintings into my work, with a subtle focus on social commentary.

My multi media art encompasses wood, steel, glass and mixed media sculptures, as well as painting.

American, born in Germany, Harry studied at the High School of Music & Art in New York and at the Art Students League of New York, returning to the League on the GI Bill after serving in Vietnam. His work is held in public collections including the Brooklyn Museum, the Wichita Art Museum, the Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art at SUNY New Paltz. From 1985 to 1989 he and Nava Atlas toured a two-person exhibition of their book works, The Radwaste and Stonehenge Books, which originated at the Wichita Art Museum. In 1994, not long after Amberwood Press was founded, the two also made The Idea Book, a journal for creative thinkers, still available as signed first editions.

That Radwaste series — begun out of his own job in the radioactive waste industry, and still growing decades later — is the subject of Radwaste Trilogy: Book 1 — Radioactive Art, published by Amberwood Press in September 2026. Written with his son, the philosopher and writer Evan Tabak Atlas, it sets the work down as a father-and-son dialogue: the present looking back at the past, and at what the series has to say about the marks we leave on the natural world.