Jean Valentine

Jean Valentine (April 27, 1934December 29, 2020) was an American poet. Over a six-decade career, Valentine published 14 collections of poetry. She received the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry for ''Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003'', and was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for ''Break the Glass''. In celebrating the later, the committee of judges noted, “This is a collection in which small details can accrue great power and a reader is never sure where any poem might lead.”

Throughout her career, Valentine served on the Creative Writing faculty of New York University, Columbia University, and Sarah Lawrence College. Among numerous awards and honors, she was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bollingen Prize, and the Yale Younger Poets Prize. Additionally, Valentine served as Poet Laureate of New York from 2008 to 2010. Often celebrated for her minimalist poetics, fellow poet Seamus Heaney once described her verse as “rapturous, risky, shy of words but desperately true to them.” Provided by Wikipedia