the terrible stories

tell yourself that anytime now

we will rise and walk away

from somebody else’s life.

any time.

child, i tell you now it was not

the animal blood i was hiding from,

it was the poet in her, the poet and

the terrible stories she could tell.

She has received many fellowships, awards, and distinctions for her poetry collections and children’s books, including the Shelley Memorial Prize, the Charity Randall Citation, and an Emmy Award from the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. She is the only author to have two books of poetry chosen as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in one year: Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969–1980 and Next: New Poems, both from BOA, in 1988. These were followed by Quilting: Poems 1987–1990 (BOA, 1991), and The Book of Light (Copper Canyon, 1993). She lives in Columbia, Maryland.