Jana Harris (born September 21, 1947) is an American poet, novelist, and essayist and the founder of one of the internet's first electronic poetry journals.
Harris was born in San Francisco, California. She attended the University of Oregon (B.S., 1969) and San Francisco State University (M.A., 1972). She has taught creative writing at New York University (1980) and, since 1986, at the University of Washington. [1]
She is the founder and editor of Switched-on Gutenberg, one of the internet's earliest electronic poetry journals. [1] Its first issue was in June 1995 and included work by Galway Kinnell, Joyce Carol Oates, and others. [2]
Several of her volumes of poetry concern the lives of American pioneers and settlers. The Dust of Everyday Life: An Epic Poem of the Pacific Northwest, which won the 1998 Andres Berger Award, looks at the lives of pioneers in the Pacific Northwest. Two other poem collections, Oh How Can I Keep on Singing: Voices of Pioneer Women (1993) and You Haven't Asked About My Wedding or What I Wore: Poems of Courtship on the American Frontier (2014), are based on the diaries, reminiscences, and stories of American pioneer women of the 19th century such as Martha Gay Masterson and Catherine Sager Pringle. [1] One critic termed Oh How Can I Keep on Singing "vivid, authentic, and moving", [3] while another wrote that Harris has "rescued from virtual oblivion the voices of these women, who have much to tell us about ourselves and our own world." [4]
Harris's poetry has been frequently anthologized, and among the awards she has won are the prestigious Pushcart Prize for poetry (2001) and the Andres Berger Award. [1] She has been a finalist for the PEN West Center Award and has won the Washington State Governor’s Writers Award. [1] [5] Two of her books—Manhattan as a Second Language and Other Poems (1982) and Oh How Can I Keep on Singing: Voices of Pioneer Women (1993). [1] [5] [6]
Writer Lynn Middleton has based a play, Fair Sex, on Harris's poetry. [7]
Harris's nonfiction book, Horses Never Lie about Love: The Heartwarming Story of a Remarkable Horse Who Changed the World Around Her, is an account of her experiences with a horse physically and psychically damaged in a fire. Fellow poet Maxine Kumin observed that it was "incisive, eloquent, sometimes lyrical, sometimes comic". [8]
She lives in the Cascade Mountains and raises horses with her husband, Mark Allen Bothwell. [1]
Adrienne Cecile Rich was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse." Rich criticized rigid forms of feminist identities, and valorized what she coined the "lesbian continuum"; which is a female continuum of solidarity and creativity which has impacted and even filled women's lives.
Lola Ridge, born Rose Emily Ridge was an Irish-American anarchist poet and an influential editor of avant-garde, feminist, and Marxist publications. She is best remembered for her long poems and poetic sequences, published in numerous magazines and collected in five books of poetry.
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Sonia Sanchez, a poet of the Black Arts Movement taking place between 1960 through 1975, authored over a dozen books of poetry, as well as short stories, critical essays, plays, and children’s books. In the 1960s, Sanchez released poems in periodicals targeting black audiences and published her collection, Homecoming, in 1969 through Broadside Press. In 1993, she received a grant through the program Pew Fellowships in the Arts and in 2001 was awarded the Robert Frost Medal for her contributions to the canon of American poetry. She has been influential to other African-American female poets, including Krista Franklin.
Tracy K. Smith is an American poet and educator. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. She has published four collections of poetry, winning the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 volume Life on Mars.
Joy Harjo is a poet, musician, and author. She is also the first Native American United States Poet Laureate. She is an important figure in the second wave of the literary Native American Renaissance of the late twentieth century. She studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts, completed her undergraduate degree at University of New Mexico in 1976, and earned an M.F.A. at the University of Iowa in its Creative Writing Program.
Meghan O'Rourke is an American nonfiction writer, poet and critic.
Eleanor Ross Taylor was an American poet who published six collections of verse from 1960 to 2009. Her work received little recognition until 1998, but thereafter received several major poetry prizes. Describing her most recent poetry collection, Kevin Prufer writes, "I cannot imagine the serious reader — poet or not — who could leave Captive Voices unmoved by the work of this supremely gifted poet who skips so nimbly around our sadnesses and fears, never directly addressing them, suggesting, instead, their complex resistance to summary."
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Georgie Connell Sicking was a rancher and active participant in cowboy poetry gatherings throughout the American West. A Wyoming resident in her later years, Sicking was inducted in 1989 into the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame. Described as "a cowboy who just happens to be a woman", Sicking was known for her old-fashioned feminine values and self-determination.
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