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AUTHOR & POET AWARDS

JEAN VALENTINE

NEW YORK STATE
WALT WHITMAN CITATION OF MERIT
STATE POET AWARD WINNER 2008-2010

Jean Valentine is the author of eleven books of poetry including “Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems” (Wesleyan), which won the 2004 National Book Award for poetry, and her most recent book, “Little Boat” (Wesleyan) which was published in 2007. She has also edited a collection of essays on poet Eleanor Ross Taylor.

Valentine is known for poems of striking intensity that derive much of their structure and imagery from dreams. She has long enjoyed a small but passionate following of readers and fellow poets. Writing in the “New York Times Book Review,” David Kalstone said, “Miss Valentine has a gift for tough strangeness, but also a dreamlike syntax and manner of arranging the lines of . . . short poems so as to draw us into the doubleness and fluency of feelings.”

Valentine’s first book, “Dream Barker, and Other Poems” (1965), was the recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. Valentine has also been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Maurice English Prize, a Sara Teasdale Award, and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Bunting Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, and The New York Council for the Arts. Most recently, Valentine received the 2006 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her other poetry collections include “The Cradle of the Real Life” (2000), “Growing Darkness, Growing Light” (1997), “The Under Voice” (1995), “The River at Wolf” (1992), “Home, Deep, Blue” (1989), “The Messenger” (1979), “Ordinary Things” (1974), and “Pilgrims” (1969).

Valentine has taught in the Department of Writing at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY, since 1974. She has also taught at Hunter College, the Graduate Writing Program of New York University, Columbia University, and the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, among other universities, colleges and programs.

For additional information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at https://www.albany.edu/writers-inst.