Jude Nutter is the recipient of several major poetry awards including: the Marlboro Review Prize for Poetry, the Loft National Prize for Poetry, the Listowel Writers' Week Prize in Poetry, the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Prize, and the Marjorie J. Wilson Prize for Excellence in Poetry. She holds an undergraduate degree in Fine Art Printmaking and is graduate of the MFA Poetry program at the University of Oregon, Eugene. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, received an International Merit Award and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize three years in a row. In 2002 she received a Blacklock Nature Sanctuary Residency and a State Arts Grant from the University of Minnesota.

About Pictures of the Afterlife:

"Jude Nutter's early work is measured and precise, elegiac in its sorrow and love for the natural world. It was no surprise when I found she had homesteaded on Wrangell Island in Alaska for ten years, working the land, watching birds, listening to snow, and writing poems. That quality of solitude, patience and a survivalist's strict attention to detail comes through in her work. Nutter's first collection, Pictures of the Afterlife, explores not only the possibility of the spirit's existence after the death of the body, it also includes poems that look at how we navigate the earthly life after loss, trauma, or any event that realigns our consciousness. To paraphrase Adam Philips, these poems are concerned with what can be done with what is left. And her poetry has continued to expand to include her growing passions and concerns — the power and fragilty or the body, the intricacies of the mind, and the capacity of the living heart to heal itself. These are intelligent, mature, hardworking poems that are blessed with clarity and complexity, designed to deepen your experience of this world, and prepare you, with tenderness, for what comes next."
—Dorianne Laux, Associate Professor of Creative Writing, University of Oregon, Eugene