Patricia Goedicke

1931 –
2006

On June 21, 1931, Patricia Goedicke was born in Boston, Massachusetts and brought up in Hanover, New Hampshire. She received her MA in Creative Writing in 1956 from Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. She has taught at Ohio University, Hunter College, Kalamazoo College, and the University of Guanajuato in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, where she lived for many years before returning to the United States and a position on the Guest Writing Faculty at Sarah Lawrence.

Goedicke's first book of poetry, Between Oceans, was published in 1968 by Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. Her twelfth and most recent volume of poetry is As Earth Begins to End, published in 2000 by Copper Canyon and named by the American Library Association one of its "Top Ten" books of poetry for the year.

Among her prizes and awards are the 2002 Chad Walsh Poetry Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, the Ohioana Poetry Award for a body of work by a poet who has resided in Ohio for at least 5 years, the H.G. Merriam Award for Distinguished Contributions to Montana Literature, and a Rockefeller Foundation Residency at its Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, Italy.

Her poems have been widely anthologized in such collections as The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women, Strong Measures, No More Masks, Writing in a Nuclear Age, The Treasury of American Poets, A Geography of Poets, Claiming the Spirit Within: A Source Book of Women's Poetry, and September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond. Awarded its Distinguished Scholar Award in 1991, she taught in the Creative Writing Program of the University of Montana in Missoula for more than 25 years.

She died on July 14, 2006.