Mary Kenney O'Sullivan

“I refused to do a man’s job without a man’s pay.”

Mary Kenney O’Sullivan was born on January 8, 1864 in Hannibal, Missouri.  She was working class Irish and began her formal schooling at age nine but in her early teens she left school and became a dressmaker and then worked in a printing and binding factory in Missouri and several binderies in the Chicago area.  She was supporting her invalid mother after the death of her father.  She learned every job available to a woman and became a forewoman.  She knew the working conditions to be horrible and this propelled her to organize her co-workers to form a union.  She established the Chicago Women’s Bindery Workers’ Union finding much support for this union from Jane Adams and Hull-House where she did volunteer work.   In 1891 she was appointed the first woman general organizer of the American Federation of Labor, appointed by Samuel Gompers.  During the time she held this post she organized garment workers in New York City and Troy, New York, and printers, binders, shoe workers and carpet weavers in Massachusetts. This led her to travel extensively throughout New York, Massachusetts and Illinois organizing women’s unions.

In 1894 she married John F. O’Sullivan the labor editor for the Boston Globe.  They had four children but Mary continued her labor work, organizing local rubber makers and laundry workers speaking frequently at union meeting.

In 1902 John was run over by a train leaving Mary to support herself and their three children, which she did, while still remaining in the forefront of the labor movement.  At the age of fifty she became a factory inspector for the Massachusetts Department of Labor and Industries, a position she held through her seventies.  

Sarah Emma Evelyn Edmonds

Sarah Emma Evelyn Edmonds was born in December 1841 in New Brunswick, Canada. She received scant education as a child but she did enjoy reading and was inspired by Fanny Campbell, the Female Pirate Captain by Maturin Murray Ballou. Sometime in the 1850’s she ran away from home and was an itinerant Bible salesman, dressing as a man and going by the name of Frank Thompson, the disguise undoubtedly inspired by Ballou’s book .  She gradually made her way west and by 1861 was living in Flint, Michigan where, shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War, she enlisted (as Franklin Flint Thompson) in a volunteer infantry company that became Company F, 2^nd Michigan Infantry.  She took part in the battles of Blackburn’s Ford, the first Bull Run and in the Peninsular campaign of 1862 and was at Fredericksburg in December where she was an aide to Colonel Orlando M. Poe.  Several times she undertook intelligence missions behind Confederate lines in various disguises; first as a male field nurse, then as a black man (skin died with silver nitrate and using a black wig) named Cuff; an Irish peddler woman named Bridget O’Shea selling apples and soap, then as a black laundress.  Some of these times, places and disguises have been disputed but most seem historically correct.

Her military career ended when she contracted malaria and fearing discovery, checked herself into a private hospital to recuperate.  With her health restored she discovered that Franklin Thompson was now listed as a deserter so she turned to work as a nurse for the U.S. Christian Commission using the name Sarah Edmonds.  In 1865 she published a detailed, lurid and very popular fictional account of her experiences in Nurse and Spy in the Union Army. 

She married in 1867 and began securing affidavits from old army comrades in order to apply for a veteran’s pension which was granted in 1884 (12 dollars a month) to “Sarah E.E. Seelye (married name) alias Frank F. Thompson.  She was the only woman to be mustered into the Grand Army of the Republic as a regular member.  She was introduced into the Michigan Hall of Fame in 1992.

Leonel Ross Campbell Anthony O'Bryan

Leonel was born on November 11, 1857 on a Mississippi Plantation. She was educated at a private school in St. Louis until, at the age of 15, she scaled a wall to elope with George Anthony.

In 1878 she left her husband and arrived in New York City where she asked a friend of the family for a position at the New York World.  She did such a great work that they sent her to Panama as the Latin American correspondent.  After twenty years she moved to Denver, Colorado to be near her parents, and began writing for the Denver Post.  She assumed the pen name “Polly Pry” which was a rhyming tribute to her role model, Nellie Bly.

While writing an article on Colorado prisons, she met Alfred Packer who was serving a reduced sentence of forty years in prison for eating five prospectors to save himself from starvation. She argued his case as an investigative journalist stating that he had not killed them but only eaten the men after they were already dead.   She secured Packer’s release in 1901.

When union workers boycotted the Post for her stance on labor issues and immigration, Leonel started her own liberal feminist magazine named “Polly Pry”. In January of 1904 answering a knock on her door, she was shot twice by an unknown assailant.  Luckily the bullets missed her and she claimed it was organized labor trying to silence her.

She closed her magazine in 1905 and married Denver Lawyer Harry J. O’Bryan who died four years later while she was on assignment in Mexico doing a story on Pancho Villa.  She spent World War I in Greece and Albania, an advocate for free speech and as director of publicity for the Red Cross. She also came to the aid of French war orphans.  After the war, she settled again in Denver, where she continued work for the Red Cross. 

Sharlot Mabridth Hall

She was born on October 27, 1870 in Barbour County, Kansas, “When I was twelve my parents moved from Barbour County, Kansas (in which state they had been among the earliest pioneers), to Yavapai County, Arizona.  We started on the third day of November with two covered wagons drawn by four horses each.  I rode a little Texas pony and drove a band of horses.

We followed the old Santa Fe Trail nearly all the way.  In many places the deep ruts worn by the old caravans could still be seen; rock cliffs were marked by names, painted or cut into the stone, and all along the roadside were sunken graves, mostly unmarked and nearly obliterated. Often I would slide out of my saddle, as I drove the band of young horses behind the wagons, and try to read and brace up with rocks some rotting bit of board that once told who rested there.”

The family settled on lower Lynx Creek, just outside of Prescott Arizona. Her education was informal but her mother taught her to love literature.  She began writing poetry when she was twelve and progressed to short stories and historical articles. When she was 30, she became editor of Out West Magazine.  

In 1909 she became the first woman to hold public office in the Arizona Territory, serving as Arizona’s historian. In 1928 she purchased the Old Governor’s Mansion in Prescott and moved in with her extensive collection of Arizona artifacts opening it as a museum.  She also traveled extensively giving lectures on Arizona history. Her dream, The Sharlot Hall Museum continues as a state institution.  In 1981 she was named to the Arizona Women’s Hall of Fame for her contribution to the literature and history of Arizona.

 

Mary Church Terrell

Mary Church Terrell was born September 23, 1863 in Memphis Tennessee.  Her father was a former slave who opened a saloon after her was freed by his master, who was also his father.  During the yellow fever epidemic of 1878-79 he invested all his money in real estate as people fled the city becoming the South’s first black millionaire.  When she was six her parents divorced and she was sent to board with a family in Ohio.

She attended Oberlin College majoring in the classics.  She took the four year curriculum of men’s courses rather than the suggested two year “ladies’ curriculum.  She received her bachelor’s degree in 1884; one of the first African American women awarded a college degree.  She then studied in Europe for two years becoming fluent in French, German and Italian.

In 1891 she married Robert Heberton Terrell one of the first black graduates of Harvard. They settled in Washington D.C. where she began a long and illustrious career in community service; as high school teacher and principal for eleven years served on the District of Columbia Board of Education, the first black women to hold such a position.  Mary was also president for life of the National Association of Colored Women. She joined the suffragist cause and lectured at the 1898 convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association.  Beginning in the 1920’s Mary served as an advisor to the Republican National Committee, assisting black women with their newly won right to vote.

She had a thirty year career as lecturer on such topics as racial injustice, black history and culture, and the black woman’s advancement since Emancipation.  She wrote for newspapers and magazines, resulting with the publication in 1940 of her autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World.

At the age of eighty seven Mary staged a sit in at a Washington restaurant in an attempt at desegregation.  Her efforts failed, so she sued and took her case all the way to the Supreme Court, where she was victorious.

Florence Augusta Merriam Bailey

Florence Augusta Merriam Bailey was born in Locust Grove, New York on August 8, 1863.  Her interest in nature began in her early childhood and when she entered Smith College she was specializing in ornithology.  Florence published her first book, Birds Through a Looking Glass in 1889. Several years later she headed west in hoping that a milder climate would help her tuberculosis.  The next three years were spent travelling through Utah, Arizona, and finally California observing western birds.  Upon returning home she turned her experiences in the west into three more bird books.  Her travels did result in an improvement in her health and eventually resulted in several other books. Her experiences in Utah, Southern California, and Arizona were chronicled in My Summer in a Mormon Village (1894), A Birding on a Bronco (1896), and Birds of Village and Field (1898).  

In 1899 she married Vernon Bailey who worked for the U.S. Biological Survey where her brother was director.  They traveled to New Mexico for Vernon’s work but Florence took great advantage of the time and published the classic Handbook of Birds of the Western United States in 1902.

The Baileys spent more than thirty years walking and riding through the Dakotas, the Southwest, the Pacific Northwest and Texas collecting and identifying specimens. Florence was the first woman to receive the Brewster Medal of the American Ornithologists Union and then in 1933 she was given an honorary L.L.D. degree from the University of New Mexico.

Ella Elgar Bird Dumont

Ella Elgar Bird Dumont

“…there were months that I did not see the face of even one woman…”

Ella was born on July 3^rd 1861 in Guntown, Mississippi. Her father died of typhus during the Civil war and her mother remarried soon after. Two years and two children later her stepfather also died.  The little family including children, mother and grandmother migrated west to Johnson County, in the Panhandle of Texas in 1867.

When she was fifteen she met and married James Thomas Bird. They lead a nomadic life traveling in every direction from their base camp hunting buffalo and other game, for several years. It was a solitary existence. Ella was a crack shot, expert skinner and tanner, seamstress, sculptress and later writer which only begins to hint at her talent and abilities. She carved local gypsum rock and made many beautiful statues and vases. 

Ella loved to sculpt and she regretted that she didn’t do more of it, believing she had “buried a talent on those broad and barren prairies of the Texas Panhandle.” Instead, she raised two children and earned extra money by beading, making many fringed and beaded vests of buckskin which sold for $12 each. Beaded gauntlet gloves were $7 each.

Tom died suddenly in 1886, probably from ruptured appendix while out on a roundup.  In 1889 Ella received a letter from an old friend, Augste Dumont pledging his love and asking for her hand in marriage.  Ella replied she would rather remain friends.  They did marry however six years later where they lived in Paducah, Texas on the lower story of the jail in “six nicely plastered rooms”.   Aguste was a deputy sheriff, postmaster and dry goods merchant there.  Ella raised flowers, poultry, and collected cacti boasting of a garden with more than 400 varieties.  She wrote her memoirs and spent thirteen years trying, unsuccessfully to publish them.  They were finally published posthumously in 1898.

Helen Marot

Helen Marot

Helen was born on June 9^th 1865 in Philadelphia to a Quaker family.  She was educated at home and al local Friends’ schools and was raised to be fiercely independent. Her father always told her, “I want you to think for yourself – not the way I do. “

Beginning in 1893 she held several positions in a library in Philadelphia and Wilmington Delaware.  After a few years she opened a small library of her own in Philadelphia for “those interested in social and economic problems.”  This library became a gathering place for liberal thinkers.  Helen described it in an interview, “People of all shades of radicalism come there – Single Taxes, Socialists, Philosophical Anarchists – attracted by the unusual books and periodicals and no less by the opportunity for discussion.”

In 1899 Helen was hired by the U.S. Industrial Commission to investigate the custom tailoring trades in Philadelphia.  She discovered dismal working conditions especially for women and children. This changed her overnight from a peaceful librarian into a militant activist.  In 1902 she traveled to New York City to uncover child labor issues there and this resulted in the formation of the New York Child Labor Committee. The following year she helped push the Compulsory Education Act through the New York Legislature.

In 1906 Helen was elected secretary of the Women’s Trade Union League of New York, a position she held for the next seven years.  During this time she lectured on the benefits of unions and her research helped persuade the U. S. Supreme Court to uphold the constitutionality of a law limiting working hours for women.  Her work led to the great waist and dressmaker’s strike which brought attention to the workers ‘plight and empowered women beginning a great industrial revolution in the garment industry leading to the formation of the International ladies’ Garment Workers Union. 

Isabel Chapin

Isabel Chapin was born April 17, 1845 in Irasburg, Vermont to Dr. and Mrs. Hayes   She often accompanied her father on his medical calls and assisted at home with farm duties. Her parents were forward thinkers and impressed upon all of their children the value of a good education and the recognition of one’s abilities regardless of their gender, “your mother and I both believe girls should do whatever they’re capable of doing…”     At eighteen she married William Chapin who was a Congregational minister.  Just a few weeks later she boarded the Sydenbam with her husband and beloved cat to begin the five month journey to Bombay.

The Chapins had planned to do missionary work in India for ten years but William soon succumbed to diphtheria leaving Isabel a nineteen year old widow.  She stayed alone for six months in India then returning to the United States to study medicine in order to return to India as a medical missionary.

While studying medicine she fell in love with a patient, Samuel Barrows and they married in 1867. He supported her while she pursued her medical degree after which she supported him while he attended Harvard Divinity School to become a Unitarian minister.  Isabel attended the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary for Women and Children then sent a year abroad at the University of Vienna specializing in ophthalmology.  Meanwhile, Sam took a job in Washington D.C., as stenographic secretary to  Secretary of State, William H. Seward. 

Upon her return to America, Isabel opened a private practice in the capital and taught diseases of the eye at Howard University’s School of Medicine.  When Sam became ill, she stepped into his position with Seward and because the first woman stenographic reporter in Congress, the first woman ever to be employed by the State Department and possibly the only female State Department employee to receive the same salary as a man.

Women's History Month

We are in March and it is the annual celebration of Women's History Month.
Women have moved in this world in remarkable ways.  The other evening we celebrated with an amazing audience - there must have been seventy or eighty? - we lost count.  We were hosted by the Cortez Cultural Center.  They are always so welcoming.  We truly appreciate them.
Teri Helm presented Betty Pellett or as she was often referred to, That Pellett Woman!  What a beautiful character she shared with us!  Betty was a legend in her own time and Teri really brought that out!  I could have listened all night.

Ann Bassett, Queen of the Rustlers, arrived with Midge Kirk.  A pretty feisty woman who ruled her ranch in Brown's Park with an iron hand and lots of drive and hard work.  She also romanced many of the outlaws who visited, particularly Butch and Sundance.  Not necessarily a role model, but certainly an exciting character who could rope, ride and shoot better than most men by the age of 9 and as she said, "I only got better with age!"

Then the character of Lizzy Knight was brought to us by her great, great, great granddaughter, Marsha Bankston.  HerStory welcomed her as a guest to tell the tales of Lizzy who was herself a rancher, entrepreneur, blacksmith and many other things in the heart (which she created) of Disappointment Valley.
We thank Marsha for joining us for a great evening.


I think a good time was had by all.

Ruth McCormick Simms

Ruth Hanna McCormick Simms was born March 27, 1880, in Cleveland Ohio. Although attending private schools she received most of her education from her father.  He sent her to investigate living conditions among streetcar employees when she was sixteen.  Later that year he became William McKinley’s presidential campaign manager and she accompanied him on a national tour.  In 1898 he was elected US Senator and she served as his personal secretary.

Ruth married Medill McCormick, a newspaperman, in 1903 and the settled in Chicago and had three children. They shared an interest and politics and she helped him get elected to the US House of Representatives in 1916 and to the Senate in 1918.  Ruth was selected as the first chairman of the Women’s Executive Committee of the Republican National Committee.  In 1924 she became the Republican National Committee woman from Illinois and organized a network of statewide women’s Republican clubs with several thousand members.

After Medill died in 1925, Ruth ran for Republican congressman-at-large from Illinois, declaring, “I am no longer a suffragette or a feminist, I am a politician.”  She won the election but after only two months in office decided to run for the Senate in 1930.  She won the primary but lost the election and sought an elected position again.

In 1926 she bought control of a newspaper in Rockford, Illinois and four years later added a second newspaper and a radio station.

In 1932 she married Albert Simms a retired Congressman from New Mexico.  After this marriage Ruth withdrew from politics and founded a girl’s school in Albuquerque, and maintained a large sheep and cattle ranch in Colorado.  She returned to the political life for a short time to help Wendell Wilkie in his presidential campaign in 1940 and Thomas E. Dewey’s in 1944.

Inez Haynes Irwin

Inez was born March 2, 1873 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil where her parents had relocated from New England in hopes of becoming financially successful in the coffee business.  Their efforts failed when she was very young and they moved back to Boston.

She was the ninth of twelve children and from observing her mother’s life of toil and childbearing she developed “a profound horror of the women’s life” that formed the basis for her lifelong feminist views.  At fourteen while researching the topic “Should Women Vote?” for a school paper she became a confirmed suffragist. 

She married Rufus Hamilton Gillmore in 1897 and at the same time entered Radcliffe College founding the College Equal Suffrage League which organized undergraduates for the cause of suffrage.  Upon graduation she and her husband moved to New York City becoming leaders in the avant-garde Greenwich Village community.  Inez published magazine articles and short stories and in 1908 her first novel, June Jeopardy.  During this time she met William Henry Irwin managing editor of McClure’s Magazine.  She left her first husband in 1913, obtained a divorce and married Irwin in 1916.

She now turned to writing full time and accompanied her husband to Europe during World War I reporting on the progress of the war in Italy and France for American magazines. 

In 1921 she published The Story of the Woman’s Party, an inspiring history of the suffrage campaign, produced twelve novels and in 1924 won the O.Henry Memorial Prize for her short Story “The Spring Flight”.  Her biggest success was her Maida series of children’s books in 1910 (Maida’s Little Shop) and ended with the eleventh volume in 1951.

Myra Colby Bradwell

Myra Colby Bradwell was born in Manchester, Vermont on February 12m 1831. She became a lawyer and crusader for legal reform.   Her early formal education was in schools in Kenosha, Wisconsin and Elgin. Myra taught school for a few years before she married James Bradwell who was a lawyer.  They had three children and James began to tutor in law early in their marriage and helped her to publish the very successful Chicago Legal News which was an important legal publication. In 1869 she helped to organize Chicago’s first woman suffrage convention and she and her husband, James, were active in the founding of the American Woman Suffrage Association in Cleveland.

She drafted, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Livermore and others and secured the passage of a bill in 1869 that gave married women the right to retain their own wages and protected the rights of widows.  Later she supported her husband’s successful efforts to secure legislation making women eligible to serve in school offices and as notaries public and to be equal guardians of their children.

In 1869 she passed her bar exam in Illinois but was denied admission because she was a woman.  Taking the case to the Supreme Court she lost there as well.  The court stated that it was a matter for states’ jurisdiction. Finally, when she was fifty nine, twenty one years after passing the bar exam, Illinois gave her a license to practice law in her state, and in 1871 she was admitted to practice law before the Supreme Court of the United States.

The American Law Review wrote that she “was one of the most remarkable women of her generation.” 

Betherina Angelina Owens Adair

When a pale, frail or nervous woman patient was brought to her she offered this advice:

“Now, in addition to your medicine I want you to take a horseback ride every day, but mind you must ride the new style. “  She was referring to riding full in the saddle rather than side saddle that society had previously demanded.

Bethenia  Angelina Owens was born on February 7^th 1840 in Van Buren County, Missouri.  Her Family joined in the western migration when she was only three and they settled near Roseburg, Oregon.

At 14 she was married but divorced her abusive husband at 16 turning to millinery work to earn a living and raise her son, George. When he headed to college to become a doctor, she went to Philadelphia also to study medicine receiving a degree in 1873 from the Eclectic School of Medicine. She returned to Oregon and was the first woman to practice medicine there.  She furthered her education at the University Of Michigan Medical School and earned her M.D. degree in 1880 at the age of forty. She spent time in Chicago and Europe before returning to Oregon and Yakima Washington to practice medicine.  There were very few women practicing medicine on the Pacific coast. She was involved in medical legislation and the suffrage movement.

Theresa Helburn

Theresa Helburn

Theresa was born on January 12, 1887 in New York City.  As a child her mother frequently took her to the theater which she loved! She graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1908 and took up writing producing a few plays, none of which were terribly successful.  In 1914 she co-founded the Washington Street Players in New York City, later called the Theatre Guild, which presented European plays.   

The Guild enjoyed a successful first season and gained a reputation as America’s foremost art theater, specializing in bringing the highest-quality drama of Europe and America to Broadway stages. Theresa was the executive Director and took part in all aspects of production, using her writing talents to rewrite dialogue, (with- and sometimes, without - the playwrights approval) and became known as the “play doctor.”

Despite some great success, the Guild was bankrupts in 1943. Theresa decided to turn the play Green Grow the Lilacs into a musical and hired Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein to write it.  The result was the musical Oklahoma! which became a great success and revolutionized American musical theater.  The Kiowa Indian tribe of Oklahoma made Theresa a chief and named her “Little Lady Who Sees Far.”

Two years later she again hired Rodgers and Hammerstein to turn the play Liliom into a musical and the result was Carousel, another great hit. She continued to bring serious plays to the American public and established close working relationships with Eugene O’Neill and George Bernard Shaw.  

"Aunt"Clara Brown

Clara “Aunt Clara” Brown

Happy New Year!

Wishing all a very peaceful, prosperous 2014 filled with joy, love and creativity!!
To begin this auspicious New Year a quote from Mary Oliver, one of my all time favorite poets.  It is if she writes for me, and me along!  Of course I know that isn't the case but she so often really hits my heart as if it had a bulls eye and she can see it.

" I want to think again of dangerous and noble things...I want to be improbable and beautiful and afraid of nothing as thought I had wings."

Wishing you all wings for this fresh, new year!


Mary and her best friend!

Poet Mary Oliver is an “indefatigable guide to the natural world,” wrote Maxine Kumin in the Women’s Review of Books, “particularly to its lesser-known aspects.” Oliver’s verse focuses on the quiet of occurrences of nature: industrious hummingbirds, egrets, motionless ponds, “lean owls / hunkering with their lamp-eyes.” Kumin noted that Oliver “stands quite comfortably on the margins of things, on the line between earth and sky, the thin membrane that separates human from what we loosely call animal.” Oliver’s poetry has won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and a Lannan Literary Award. Reviewing Dream Work(1986) for the Nation, critic Alicia Ostriker numbered Oliver among America’s finest poets, as “visionary as [Ralph Waldo] Emerson.” 

Mary Oliver was born in 1935 in Maple Heights, Ohio. She attended both Ohio State University and Vassar College, but did not receive a degree from either institution. As a young poet, Oliver was deeply influenced by Edna St. Vincent Millay and briefly lived in Millay’s home, helping Norma Millay organize her sister’s papers. Oliver is notoriously reticent about her private life, but it was during this period that she met her long-time partner, Molly Malone Cook. The couple moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and the surrounding Cape Cod landscape has had a marked influence on Oliver’s work. Known for its clear and poignant observations and evocative use of the natural world, Oliver’s poetry is firmly rooted in place and the Romantic nature tradition. Her work received early critical attention; American Primitive (1983), her fifth book, won the Pulitzer Prize. According to Bruce Bennetin the New York Times Book Review, American Primitive, “insists on the primacy of the physical.” Bennet commended Oliver’s “distinctive voice and vision” and asserted that the “collection contains a number of powerful, substantial works.” Holly Prado of the Los Angeles Times Book Review also applauded Oliver’s original voice, writing that American Primitive “touches a vitality in the familiar that invests it with a fresh intensity.” 

Dream Work (1986) continues Oliver’s search to “understand both the wonder and pain of nature” according to Prado in a later review for the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Ostriker considered Oliver “among the few American poets who can describe and transmit ecstasy, while retaining a practical awareness of the world as one of predators and prey.” For Ostriker, Dream Work is ultimately a volume in which Oliver moves “from the natural world and its desires, the ‘heaven of appetite’...into the world of historical and personal suffering...She confronts as well, steadily,” Ostriker continued, “what she cannot change.” 

The transition from engaging the natural world to engaging more personal realms is also evident in New and Selected Poems (1992), which won the National Book Award.The volume contains poems from eight of Oliver’s previous volumes as well as previously unpublished, newer work. Susan Salter Reynolds, in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, noticed that Oliver’s earliest poems are almost always oriented towards nature, but seldom examine the self and are almost never personal. In contrast, Oliver appears constantly in later works. But as Reynolds noted “this self-consciousness is a rich and graceful addition.” Just as the contributor for Publishers Weekly called particular attention to the pervasive tone of amazement with regard to things seen in Oliver’s work, Reynolds found Oliver’s writings to have a “Blake-eyed revelatory quality.” Oliver summed up her desire for amazement in her poem “When Death Comes” from New and Selected Poems: “When it’s over, I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.” 

Oliver continues her celebration of the natural world in later collections, includingWinter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (1999), Why I Wake Early (2004),New and Selected Poems, Volume 2 (2004), and Swan: Poems and Prose Poems(2010). Critics have compared Oliver to other great American lyric poets and celebrators of nature, including Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Muir, and Walt Whitman. “Oliver’s poetry,” wrote Poetry contributorRichard Tillinghast in a review of White Pine (1994) “floats above and around the schools and controversies of contemporary American poetry. Her familiarity with the natural world has an uncomplicated, nineteenth-century feeling.” 

A prolific writer of both poetry and prose, Oliver publishes a new collection every year or two. Her main themes continue to be the intersection between the human and the natural world, as well as the limits of human consciousness and language in articulating such a meeting. Jeanette McNew in Contemporary Literature described “Oliver’s visionary goal,” as “constructing a subjectivity that does not depend on separation from a world of objects. Instead, she respectfully confers subjecthood on nature, thereby modeling a kind of identity that does not depend on opposition for definition…At its most intense, her poetry aims to peer beneath the constructions of culture and reason that burden us with an alienated consciousness to celebrate the primitive, mystical visions that reveal ‘a mossy darkness – / a dream that would never breathe air / and was hinged to your wildest joy / like a shadow.’”

Mary Oliver held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College until 2001. In addition to such major awards as the Pulitzer and National Book Award, Oliver has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has also won the American Academy of Arts & Letters Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize and Alice Fay di Castagnola Award. She lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

From the National Poetry Foundation