WELCOME!

The latest news:  On November 7, 2023 Jeanne’s memoir, Leaping from the Burning Train: A Poet’s Journey of Faith will be published by Slant Books. You can choose from several options to pre-order the book on the Slant website. 

Jeanne Murray Walker is the award-winning author of 9 volumes of
poetry and one memoir as well as a number of plays which have been
performed in theaters across the country and in London. She is an
Emeritus Professor at The University of Delaware, where she taught
for 40 years and headed the Creative Writing Concentration.  Jeanne
currently serves as a poetry Mentor in The Seattle Pacific Low
Residency MFA Program.  From her home outside Philadelphia
she blogs about the troubling politics of our time, reading and writing,
and the surprising power of stillness.   She travels widely to speak
and read her poems in places ranging from The Library of Congress
to Romania, from Italy to Texas Canyon Country. You can find her
papers and letters archived at Wheaton College’s Buswell Library
and at The University of Delaware’s Morris Library. Jeanne has
appeared on PBS television and is frequently interviewed on the radio.

HOLDING ACTION

Letters, be the memory of this moment, Ruth’s 3-legged Golden Lab sniffing for news beneath the hedge, grass glittering with rain, the bird feeder mangled by our car. Years from now I want to remember how we walked the splendid earth and saw it.  When children read this and smile at its old fashioned vision, then words, stubborn little boxcars lugging meaning across the rickety wooden bridge to the future, hold, hold.  Couple against time, bear the red geranium, the slender birch— you, sentences–glitter against the massive dark of nothing.  Tell of feet that buffed this doorsill till it gleams, of cartwheeling children.  Remember the Rosetta stone, the hum of Xerox machines, remember monks copying, how a prisoner in solitary picked up a pebble to scribble stories on the wall.  Letters, I tell you, even if your paper yellows in the attic, even if it’s torn and thrown into the sea, each of you separate from your brothers, swim through the ocean, row across the sky, walk through the wasteland, find a reader.  Stay together.  Hold.