For her family’s pleasure, Alice Stevens compiled one collection of her poems and another of old recipes, and both times the reception was so enthusiastic the work was published for a wider audience.
More Top Picks Best Wet Brick Saws For Home
The last book she worked on, a collection of poems written over four decades, invigorated her in recent months as cancer ravaged her body, said her husband, Richard.
More than a decade after first fighting breast cancer, Mrs. Stevens, 61, died on Friday, Dec. 24, at her South Loop home after a recurrence of the disease that spread throughout her body, her husband said.
Her book of poems, “Swimming the Everglades,” was published this summer.
“Alice was close to death and when the book was published, I really think that it revived her and excited her,” her husband said.
The collection was originally intended just to be printed for friends and family, but the man who printed the collection read the poems and liked them so much he urged her to make them available to the public.
Mrs. Stevens also self-published a cookbook called “Aunt Alice’s Goodies: Old Time Recipes We Grew Up With” full of recipes from her childhood growing up on the South Side.
“I reviewed my dog-eared, batter-splattered recipe cards with all the chicken-scratched handwriting and decided it was time to commit these treasures to digital format,” Mrs. Stevens wrote on her Web site. “I want the next generation to delight their children and their children’s children with these old comfort sweets including home-made hard fudge, mayonnaise cake, pecan tarts, and prize-winning blueberry pie.”
Mrs. Stevens, whose poetry appeared in various magazines, was also politically active. She marched for women’s rights and was a volunteer for Harold Washington’s campaign for mayor of Chicago, her husband said.
Most recently, she had volunteered as a tutor at 826CHI, a nonprofit writing and tutoring center for kids. Proceeds from the sale of her books benefit the center, Richard Stevens said.
Mrs. Stevens, who had a master’s degree in English from the University of Illinois at Chicago, held various writing and editing jobs around the country, and more recently was a Web content manager for BlueCross BlueShield Association, her family said.
In addition to her husband, Mrs. Stevens is survived by two sons, Chris Skeens and Jonathan Stevens; and her siblings: Michael Allgaier, Kathleen Gribble, Lawrence Allgaier, Jane McCall, Rose Somers, Mary Beedle, John Allgaier and Elizabeth Britain.
Services are set for 11 a.m. Saturday in the Grainger Ballroom at Symphony Center, 220 S. Michigan Ave.