BIOGRAPHICAL STATEMENT

Jeanne Murray Walker has written six collections of poetry, including Fugitive Angels, Coming Into History, Gaining Time, and A Deed to the Light, to be released by The University of Illinois Press in the spring of 2004.  Her poems have appeared in many anthologies and hundreds of journals, including American Scholar, Atlantic Monthly, Boulevard, the Courtland Review, the Chicago Tribune, Image, The Nation, Partisan Review, Poetry, Prairie Schooner,and Southern Review.  Her work has also traveled on busses and trains with Poetry in Motion.  Among her awards are The Prairie Schooner-Strousse Prize, six Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Awards, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.  An Atlantic Monthly Fellow at Bread Loaf School of English, Walker was awarded the coveted Pew Fellowship in The Arts in l998.  She serves on the Editorial Board of Shenandoah and acts as the Poetry Editor of Christianity and Literature.  She frequently teaches in London.  She is also a playwright whose work has been produced in Boston, Washington, across the Midwest, and in London.  Married and the mother of two children, she lives in Philadelphia and is a Professor of English at The University of Delaware.

Jeanne Murray Walker’s poetry has “the compulsiveness of fiction,” according to Dave Smith, “which makes us want to turn the page.”  Richard Hugo wrote that her poems “ring true and wild as currents of wind inside a storm cloud.”  “Splendid,” John Taylor said in a review in Poetry.  With their “simultaneous yearning for eternity and affection for dailiness,” the poems are “subtly erudite, uplifting, and funny.”   

Walker’s books are available on Amazon.com and/ or (at a discount) from Spring Church Book Company, which can be reached by phone at 800-476-1262.