Jean Valentine was born in Chicago in 1934. Her first book of poems, Dream Barker and Other Poems, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1965. She published more than a dozen collections of poetry during her lifetime, including The River at Wolf (1992); Little Boat (2007); Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965–2003, which won the National Book Award; Break the Glass (2010); and Shirt in Heaven (2015). Valentine served as the State Poet of New York from 2008 to 2010. Her awards and honors include a Bunting Institute Fellowship, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the Shelley Memorial Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the 2017 Bollingen Prize for American Poetry. Valentine died in 2020.
Audio Recordings with Jean Valentine
- Jean Valentine and Cornelius Eady reading their poems with comment in the Montpelier Room, Library of Congress, March 22, 2001