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.

THE SHAWL

Somewhere on Ellis Island my mother’s mother lost the shawl the women of the town crocheted for her out of mauves and purples, old tunes twisted in the strands, and clever plots woven, woven in the pattern. It was a gift. Away from that shawl my mother’s mother had to move, toward the waiting train, toward Minnesota, through the smell of gasoline, through the sycamores whose leaves clinked down like foreign coins. She tripped over a broken step, caught herself, steadied her canvas bag, paid her money, wrote her name on the form, washed in communal showers, put on her skirt with its stubborn hem. When they opened the wire gate, she bowed and hoisted the bag higher to step over the threshold into the calling distance where the years stretched out plain as good dirt and she began to imagine the calamity and extreme grace of someone wearing that mauve shawl till every night in dreams she chopped it, burned it, and when it rose again, she buried it.   She spent every minute chasing the furious rooster, dropping report cards into her apron pocket, bargaining in zero weather, forgetting that old grace, finally carrying her children’s children on her hip, while she stirred the soup, their breath soft as moss, their tiny feet stuttering against her. My feet, my breath. She bore my mother like a speck toward me as I bear you in this plain dress towards your own children, holding in my empty hands her glorious shawl, sunrise over Ellis Island.