Jeanne Larsen's first book, James Cook in Search of Terra Incognita: A Book of Poems (University of Virginia, 1979), won the Associated Writing Programs annual competition in poetry. She has also published a volume of literary translations (Brocade River Poems: Selected Works of the Tang Dynasty Courtesan Xue Tao, Princeton University Press, 1987) and three novels: Silk Road (1989), Bronze Mirror (1992), and Manchu Palaces (1996), all from Henry Holt. A new book of translations, Willow, Winecup, Mirror, Moon: Women's Poems from Tang China, will be published in the spring of 2006 by BOA Editions.

The recipient of grants from the NEA, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and the Japan/U.S. Friendship Commission, Larsen lives and teaches in southwest Virginia. Her poems have appeared most recently in The Georgia Review, Pleiades, Folio, and Hunger Mountain. Essays are forthcoming in Tiferet and Fourth Genre, and poetry translations in Circumference and Cold Mountain Review.