Jean Valentine 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 tenth and most recent book of poetry 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. She is the author of eight other books (listed below). Jean's chapbook, Lucy, was published by Sarabande Books in 2009. Break the Glass, her next full-length collection, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Books in 2010.

Jean was the State Poet of New York for two years, starting in the spring of 2008. She received the 2009 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and 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, and The Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize in 2000.

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

"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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