[1] Her parents were both artists, her mother a high school music teacher specializing in piano and her father a novelist who studied at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the time of her birth.
[5] Bernard Holland of The New York Times said that in a 1996 performance in Voices of the Spirit at the 92nd Street Y, she "offer[ed] a spiritual vision that prefers hard truths to warm reassurance.
"[6] In 2000, Peter Dobrin of The Philadelphia Inquirer said that the instrumental ranges of her piece "Sudden, Unbidden" "mak[e] for an unattractive, expressive skittishness";[7] the next year, he praised her for "knowing the value of repetition" and being "especially communicative" in the first song of her composition series Early, After, Ever, Now.
[8] Weesner's 2002 piece "Still Things Move", commissioned for the Metamorphosen Chamber Orchestra, was commended by Ellen Pfeifer of The Boston Globe as "a very attractive essay in three interconnected movements",[9] and Allan Kozinn of The New York Times said that it "thrived on the ground between the Wuorinen and the Hovhaness" and "in its best moments it was animated and full of surprising turns.
[14] The same year, her 2006 piece "Mother Tongues" was performed at the Tanglewood Music Festival; Matthew Guerrieri of The Boston Globe said that it "circled its short, often pop-pentatonic motives, judged the arrangement from a distance, went back in and shifted things around.