Mary Kinzie

Mary Kinzie was born in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1944. She has published five collections of poems: The Ghost Ship (Knopf, 1996); Autumn Eros and Other Poems (1991); Summers of Vietnam and Other Poems (1990); Masked Women (1990); and The Threshold of the Year, which won the Devins Award for the best debut volume of verse published in 1981. She has published more than 150 poems in little magazines and journals, and has written extensively on contemporary poets in reviews and essays, some of which are collected in The Cure of Poetry in an Age of Prose: Moral Essays on the Poet's Calling, and The Judge is Fury: Dislocation and Form in Poetry. In 1999 she published A Poet's Guide to Poetry (University of Chicago Press) and will provide the introduction to Penguin's 2000 edition of Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea. Her honors include awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Illinois Arts Council, the MacDowell Colony, the President's Fund for the Humanities, and The Poetry Society of America. Since 1979, she has been head of the undergraduate creative writing program at Northwestern University.