bio/books
Jean Valentine 2002
Jean Valentine 1972

Jean Valentine, the current State Poet of New York (2008-2010), was born in Chicago, earned her B.A. from Radcliffe College, and has lived most of her life in New York City. She won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her most recent book is Little Boat (Wesleyan University Press, 2007). Her previous collection, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965 - 2003, was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry.

Author of eight other books (listed below), Jean has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the NEA, The Bunting Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, The New York Council for the Arts, and The New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as the Maurice English Prize, the Teasdale Poetry Prize, The Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize, and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Graduate Writing Program of New York University, Columbia University, and the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, among many other places.

"Looking into a Jean Valentine poem is like looking into a lake: you can see your own outline, and the shapes of the upper world, reflected among rocks, underwater life, glint of lost bottles, drifted leaves. The known and familiar become one with the mysterious and half-wild, at the place where consciousness and the subliminal meet. This is a poetry of the highest order, because it lets us into spaces and meanings we couldn't approach in any other way."
-- Adrienne Rich

                                                 

BOOKS BY JEAN VALENTINE:

Little Boat
(Wesleyan Poetry, 2007)

Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965 - 2003
(Wesleyan Poetry, 2004)

The Cradle of the Real Life
(Wesleyan Poetry, 2000)

Growing Darkness, Growing Light
(Carnegie Mellon Press, 1997)

The Under Voice: Selected Poems
(Salmon Publishing, 1995)

The River at Wolf
(Alice James Books, 1992)

Home Deep Blue: New and Selected Poems
(Alice James Books, 1989)

The Messenger
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979)

Ordinary Things
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974)

Pilgrims
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969)

Dream Barker
(Yale University Press, 1965)

and
The Lighthouse Keeper: Essays on the Poetry of Eleanor
Ross Taylor
(ed. Jean Valentine. Seneca Review, 2001)


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