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 collection Door in the Mountain was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. Her work has also 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, The Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize, and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Wallace Stevens Award, from the Academy of American Poets, and a fellowship from Lannan Foundation.

Other poems by Jean Valentine in Verse Daily:
March 11, 2009:   "Your Picture" "Brown museum hair, brushed the way they brush it there..."
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:
Fourteen poems
"The Blue Dory, the Soul"

Jean Valentine's Website.

Jean Valentine according to Wikipedia.

About Break the Glass:

"The poet is at her fierce best . . . Each poem shares Valentines' trademark concision and pared-down punch. Some of her severe observations can stop your breath."
—Publisher's Weekly