"You have to keep listening to Jean Valentines work, because every time some shape of sadness or recognition rises up in you as a familiar emotion, the poem veers off, leaves what you already know behind... Her work is so subtly not what you think, and of the spirit, and as fresh as water, or cool weather." Robert Hass

About the Author

Poet and teacher Jean Valentine was born in Chicago; she graduated from Radcliffe College in 1956. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council for the Arts, the Bunting Institute and from the Rockefeller Foundation. She has lived most of her life in New York City where she teaches at Sarah Lawrence College. She lived in County Sligo from 1989 to 1996 and has been a regular contributor to many Irish literary journals and reviews. She was a popular workshop leader throughout Ireland and spent time at The Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig. Among the American prizes she has won for her poetry are the Yale Younger Poets' Award, the Maurice English Prize and the Sara Teasdale Award. She received two Artsflight awards from the Irish Arts Council in 1993 and 1994. Her return to live in New York has left the Irish poetry community, in particular Irish women poets, without her warm generosity. Her distinctive poetic contribution is an important part of the canon of twentieth-century Irish poetry written by women.

See Also: The White Page / An Bhileog Bhan: 20th Century Irish Women Poets (Salmon, 1999) Adrienne Rich: New & Selected Poems (Salmon, 1997)

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