Jean Valentine was born in Chicago, earned her B.A. from Radcliffe College, and has lived most of her life in New York City. She won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her most recent book is Little Boat (Wesleyan University Press, 2007). Her previous collection, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965-2003, was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. Author of eight other books, Jean has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the NEA, The Bunting Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, The New York Council for the Arts, and The New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as the Maurice English Prize, the Teasdale Poetry Prize, and The Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize in 2000. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Graduate Writing Program of New York University, Columbia University, and the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan.

Other poems by Jean Valentine in Verse Daily:
June 25, 2005:  "I wanted to be sure to reach you" "My valley at peace with unforgetfulness..."

Books by Jean Valentine:

Other poems on the web by Jean Valentine:
"The Blue Dory, the Soul"

Jean Valentine's Website.

Jean Valentine according to Wikipedia.

About Lucy:

"Lucy’s assurance is ancient, that is its beauty, the poem goes back to the earliest of them all. It really is a retrieval not just of Lucy but of an ethos, a faith—in the human and in the poem itself, as being two-in-one. I find there are moments in it that really restore belief. This does not happen often."
—Fanny Howe