I am what book jackets used to call a centaur poet-scholar. My poems bend towards trouble, and they get around. My scholarly books focus on the English poet George Herbert, who knew the world, relished loveliness, and was acquainted with grief.
New York’s Hudson Valley is now home for me and my husband. A professor emeritus of English, I taught for twenty-three years at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. During my last twelve years there, I worked as a volunteer with unaccompanied refugee minors. On occasion I advocated with the ACLU against the death penalty and the National LGBTQ Task Force in favor of adoption rights, assembling petitions and speaking on local TV and radio. Throughout my life’s peripatetic course, I’ve taught in varied settings, including the Bard Prison Initiative, Marist College, and the Harvard Extension Summer School. After my retirement from Millsaps, Stanley Moss offered me work at the Sheep Meadow Press.
I have lived in France, my second country, for extended stays. The Camac Centre d’Art, the Dora Maar House, and the Camargo Foundation very generously supported me in my work.
I am grateful to Yaddo, MacDowell, and the Gladstone Library for their support. The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown gave me seven months of uninterrupted work in community with writers and artists. Alan Dugan, Stanley Kunitz, and their fellow visionary founders will open doors for generations—and not only through their poems.
The editors at the University of Chicago Press brought my first three books of poetry into the world. I am grateful to Paraclete Press, Mercy Seat Press, and Sheep Meadow Press for having confidence in the books that followed.
My people were central Kentucky farmers beginning in the eighteenth-century. I was reared in Hodgenville, Lincoln’s birthplace. At Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, my majors were Political Science and French Literature, with related work in English. During my college year abroad, the American bicentennial year, Paris gave me an education. My first real job after graduation was at Fisk University’s Black Music Institute. From Tennessee, I moved to California, taking my M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Stanford University, afterwards teaching high school French and working in college textbook publishing. The University of California, Berkeley gave me my doctoral education.
Continuum published George Herbert’s ‘Holy Patterns‘: Reforming Individuals in Community. Catherine and Richard Freis and I put forth three books of annotated collaborative translations of Herbert’s Latin and Greek poetry and prose. With Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, I edited Edward and George Herbert in the European Republic of Letters. I have also translated the poetry and prose of the French freethinker Théophile de Viau, who knew Paris and loved Gascony.
