Biography

Jeanne Walker, English.Jeanne Murray Walker is a writer and teacher born in Parkers Prairie, a village of a thousand people in Minnesota.  She frequently lectures, gives readings, and teaches workshops in places ranging from The Library of Congress and Oxford University to Whidbey Island, from a working fish camp in Alaska and  Texas canyon country to Orvieto, Italy.

Jeanne has written eight volumes of award winning poetry, including her latest, Helping the Morning:  New and Selected Poems.   Her poetry and essays appear in leading journals, including  Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, The Christian Century, The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, Image and Best American Poetry.   Her scripts, which have been performed in theaters across the United States and in London, are archived in North American Women’s Drama, and are published by Dramatic Publishing Company.  In The Geography of Memory:  A Pilgrimage through Alzheimer’s, Jeanne tells the hair-raising, often funny details of the decade she and her sister cared for their mother.  With Darryl Tippens, Jeanne edited Shadow and Light: Literature and the Life of Faith, an historical anthology of literature which Image magazine called the current “stand-out, single-volume” on the subject of spiritual questing.

shade-garden-blog-imageJeanne taught at The University of Delaware for 40 years, where she headed the Creative Writing Concentration and organized Study-Abroad Programs that were among the first in the nation.  She also serves as a Mentor in the Seattle Pacific University Master of Fine Arts Program.

An Atlantic Monthly Fellow at Bread Loaf School of English, Jeanne has been awarded many fellowships and prizes, among them, a Pew Fellowship in The Arts, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, eight Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships, and The Glenna Luschei-Prairie Schooner Prize.  She has appeared on PBS television and is frequently interviewed on the radio.  Her work has been distributed across Pennsylvania on posters by The Center for the Book and has appeared on buses and trains.  For 20 years she was Poetry Editor of Christianity and Literature.  She currently serves on the Editorial Boards of Image and Shenandoah magazine.

Jeanne lives with her lawyer husband in a 104-year-old house outside Philadelphia.  They are the parents of two children and the grandparents of 3 ardent soccer players.