Donnie Brooke Alderson was the wife of Peter Schjeldahl a popular American art critic, poet, and educator.
Donnie Brooke is a former actress. Together, the couple had one child, Ada Calhoun Schjeldahl, who wrote under the name Ada Calhoun
After cold writing to “papers in small cities near big ones,” he began his career at the Jersey Journal in Jersey City.
Schjeldahl worked as an art critic for the Village Voice after a brief stint writing for ArtNews, before joining the New Yorker as a staff writer in 1998.
Before art criticism took over his poetic practice, Schjeldahl also wrote poetry. He co-founded a poetry journal that was an exponent of the then-current New York School during his brief time at Carleton.
In 1978, he published a collection entitled Since 1964: New and Selected Poems, drawing from several volumes of his work.
Peter Schjeldahl passed away on October 21, 2022, at the age of 80. Although the cause of death of Schjeldahl has not been officially determined, he was diagnosed with lung cancer at the age of 77 in 2019.