Judith Harris is an American poet and the author of Night Garden (Tiger Bark Press, 2013), Atonement (LSU, 2000), The Bad Secret (LSU, 2006), and the critical book Signifying Pain: Constructing and Healing the Self Through Writing (SUNY, 2003). Her poetry has appeared in many publications, including The Nation, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Slate, Southern Review, Image, Boulevard, Narrative, Verse Daily, and American Life in Poetry. She has taught at the Frost Place and at universities in the Washington, D.C. area.[1]
In 2000, LSU Press published Atonement and her second book, The Bad Secret, in 2006.[2] Her renowned critical book, Signifying Pain: Construction and Healing the Self through Writing published by SUNY Press and is taught in many graduate seminars.[3]Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, coauthor of Cherishment: A Psychology of the Heart, said, "Signifying Pain will play an important role in the growing literature on psychoanalysis in education and in the college classroom, as it both shows and tells what a psychoanalytically informed sensibility can bring to understanding poetry. To be able to signify pain is a human triumph; to write about the signifying is, too."[4]
Her third, and most recent, collection of poetry, Night Garden, was published April 2013 by Tiger Bark Press, a literary press founded by Steven Huff, previously the executive director of BOA Editions.[5] On Night Garden, Edward Hirsch said, “Judith Harris creates tableaux of memory and shines a keen light on the particulars of the natural world in these poignant, carefully observed, and scrupulously written poems that ache with mortality. Night Garden is an illuminating book!”[1] Jeanne Marie Beaumont said, “Piercingly visionary and subtly hallucinatory, over and over these poems acknowledge the vast mysterious companionship of the natural world and the fluidity of experienced time. As the poems bring things to notice, whether the hum of Sears fans, the oddments on a basement worktable, or the smell of a pharmacy aisle, they create a new way to be intimate with the physical world. It is as though Keats's “hark!” has awoken this poet to her fullest senses, and there is no turning away. Night Garden is dug deep and flourishing.”[6]
Her essays been published and in many journals and anthologies including Tikkun,[7]College English, The Washingtonian. She has contributed articles to many anthologies and collections on poetry and the history of American poetry including Graywolf Press's After Confession[8] and Simply Lasting: Writers on Jane Kenyon,[9] and interviews of Ted Kooser and Edward Hirsch for The Writer's Chronicle of Associated Writing Programs. Her essay from Simply Lasting was selected to be in American Literature's two volume collection of twentieth century literature.[10] She is a prolific reviewer of poetry with reviews in NEO, Spoon River Review, Psychohistory Forum, American Imago, and Psychoanalysis, Society and Culture (Palgrave).[1]
Her poems have appeared in The Nation,[11]Slate,[12]The Hudson Review,Ploughshares,[13]The New Republic, The Atlantic and Narrative magazine,[14]Southern Review, the American Scholar, Prairie Schooner[15] and American Life in Poetry,[16] which is a syndicated newspaper column edited by Ted Kooser, publishing her work in places such as The New York Times,[17]The Seattle Times,[18]The Philadelphia Inquirer and many others. In 2004, she had the honor of reading at the Library of Congress[19] at the invitation of Donald Hall, then US Poet Laureate, and in 2010 was a discussant with Edward Hirsch at the Folger Shakespeare Library. She is a recipient of grants from Carnegie Mellon, and the DC Commission on the Arts where she resides and continues to teach adults and college students the art of creative writing.[1]
Books
Poetry collections
Night Garden (Tiger Bark Press, 2013) Atonement (LSU, 2000) The Bad Secret (LSU, 2006) Song of the Moon (Orchises, 1983)
Critical works
Signifying Pain: Constructing and Healing the Self Through Writing (SUNY, 2003)
Awards
Yaddow Fellowship, 2014
Individual Artist's Award, D.C. Commission on the Arts & Humanities, 2005
McCandlish Fellowship, George Washington University, 1984–87
Poetry Fellow, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Sweetbriar College, 1984
Mellon Fellowship in Creative Writing and Rhetoric, Carnegie-Mellon University, 1984
Individual Artist's Grant (Poetry), D.C. Commission on the Arts & Humanities1983-86
University Fellowship, Iowa Writers' Workshop, University of Iowa, 1982
Related Research Articles
Eamon JR Grennan is an Irish poet born in Dublin, Ireland. He attended University College Dublin where he completed a BA 1963 and an MA 1964. He has lived in the United States, except for brief periods, since 1964. He was the Dexter M. Ferry Jr. Professor of English at Vassar College until his retirement in 2004.
Nick Flynn is an American writer, playwright, and poet. His writing is characterized by lyric, distilled moments, which blur the boundaries of various genres. Many of his books are structured using a collage technique, which creates narratives with fractured, mosaic qualities. His work can be classified as récit—a French term for writing that is not the narration of an event, but an event itself. Several of his books are what he refers to as "siblings" to each other, in that they examine similar material from various perspectives.
Claudia Emerson was an American poet. She won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection Late Wife, and was named the Poet Laureate of Virginia by Governor Tim Kaine in 2008.
Anthony Dey Hoagland was an American poet. His poetry collection, What Narcissism Means to Me (2003), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other honors included two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, and a fellowship to the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. His poems and criticism have appeared in such publications as Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, AGNI, Threepenny Review, The Gettysburg Review, Ninth Letter, Southern Indiana Review, American Poetry Review and Harvard Review.
Linda Alouise Gregg was an American poet.
Mary Szybist is an American poet. She won the National Book Award for Poetry for her collection Incarnadine.
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 five collections of poetry, winning the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 volume Life on Mars. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was published in 2015.
Kevin D. Prufer is an American poet, academic, editor, and essayist. He is Professor of English in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston.
Sophie Cabot Black is an American prize-winning poet who has taught creative writing at Columbia University.
Dennis Nurkse is a poet from Brooklyn.
Terese Svoboda is an American poet, novelist, memoirist, short story writer, librettist, translator, biographer, critic and videomaker.
Katie Ford is an American poet, essayist, and professor.
Elizabeth Macklin is an American poet.
Mary Jo Bang is an American poet.
Monica Youngna Youn is an American poet and lawyer.
Judith Hall is an American poet.
Maria Saskia Hamilton was an American poet, editor, and professor and university administrator at Barnard College. She published four collections of poetry, with a fifth collection, All Souls, set to be posthumously published in September 2023. Her academic focus was largely on the American poet Robert Lowell; she edited several collections of the writings and personal correspondence of Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Elizabeth Bishop. Additionally, she served as the director of literary programs at the Lannan Foundation, as the Vice Provost for Academic Programs and Curriculum at Barnard College, and as an editor at The Paris Review and Literary Imagination.
Chelsea Rathburn is an American poet.
Donika Kelly is an American poet and academic, who is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa, specializing in poetry writing and gender studies in contemporary American literature. She is the author of the chapbook Aviarium, published with fivehundred places in 2017, and the full-length collections Bestiary and The Renunciations.
Ann Townsend is an American poet and essayist. She is the co-founder of VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts and a professor of English and director of the creative writing at Denison University, She has published three original poetry collections and co-edited a collection of lyric poems.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
