Rebecca Dunham is assistant professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa. Awards include the Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship, the 2005 Indiana Review Poetry Prize, and a 2005 Academy of American Poets Prize. She received her PhD in creative writing from the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Other poems by Rebecca Dunham in Verse Daily:
May 12, 2006:   "Ontology of the Miniature Room" " If life is a stage, then props are its truest..."
March 4, 2005:  "Catherine Blake" "I flush my paintbrush against the water bowl's sides...."

About The Miniature Room:

"This deeply melodious and intelligent gathering of poems, both painterly and literary in context, bears a stunning lushness of language and vision. There's a mysterious pulse and scent permeating the exquisitely crafted, sometimes slightly ominous, images. Poems about a small son resonate inside a larger context—the wider natural world and all of civilization. One feels hypnotized inside a 'slant' angle of perceptions unhampered by an intrusion of artifice. The Miniature Room is a manuscript of profound intention and finesse."
—Naomi Shihab Nye

"Rebecca Dunham's The Miniature Room has internalized the most difficult aesthetic lesson of early miniaturist painting: the smaller the space, the larger the wonder. And such is the experience of reading this book. For with their exquisite concentration and lapidary phrasings, these poems still somehow manage to embrace an enormous range of ideas, emotions, and historical particulars. And the world is given back to us burnished by the light of the artist's brush."
—Sherod Santos

"Rebecca Dunham's title, The Miniature Room, prepares us for the compression of these intense poems, which amaze us with the grace and rigor of their impeccable intelligence. As lyrics, the scale of these poems is intimate, but they open nonetheless onto an elaborate and intricate vision, onto a complex and palpable sublime."
—Eric Pankey