Jean Valentine was born in Chicago, earned her BA from Radcliffe College, and has lived most of her life in New York City. She won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker (Yale University Press, 1965). Her tenth and most recent book of poetry is Little Boat (Wesleyan University Press, 2007). Her previous collection, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965–2003 (Wesleyan, 2004), was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. Lucy, her new chapbook, is just out from Sarabande Books.

Valentine has received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and awards from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as the Maurice English Prize, the Teasdale Poetry Prize, and the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize.

She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Graduate Writing Program of New York University, Columbia University, and the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan.  

Photo by Max Greenstreet