Judy Jordan (born 1961) is an American poet. Her honors include the Walt Whitman Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Life
She grew up on a small farm near the Carolina border. Her parents were sharecroppers, and she was picking cotton by the time she was 5. She was the first member of her family to attend university, with a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Virginia in 1990, and a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1995. She earned a Master of Fine Arts degree, in fiction from the University of Utah, in 2000. She lived in Salt Lake City.
She taught at the University of Virginia, Piedmont Virginia Community College, and California State University, San Marcos. She teaches at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
She lives off-the-grid in a cabin that she built herself in the Shawnee National Forest, and is working on a non-fiction book about her experiences there. She has a fourth book of poetry, Children of Salt, forthcoming and has recently completed a novel entitled Broken Days, Broken Hearts and a memoir about her childhood, entitled My Mama, My Sweet Nelly. She is currently working on a biography of a woman who helped save over 15,000 children from the WW2 Croatian death camps.
Her poems have appeared in Raintaxi, Blue Pitcher Review, Crossroads: A Journal of Southern Culture, Lucid Oona, Poetry, Western Humanities Review, and Writer’s Eye.
Awards
- 1999 Walt Whitman Award
- 2000 National Book Critics Circle Award
- 1996 Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry,
Works
Poetry books
- Jordan, Judy (2000). Carolina Ghost Woods: Poems. Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8071-2556-4.
- Jordan, Judy (2008). Sixty-Cent Coffee and a Quarter to Dance A Poem. Louisiana State University Press. ISBN 978-0-8071-2996-8.
- Jordan, Judy (2018). Hunger. Tinderbox Editions. ISBN 978-1943981069.
Anthologies
- Gerald Costanzo, Jim Daniels, ed. (2000). American poetry: the next generation. Carnegie Mellon University Press. ISBN 978-0-88748-343-1.
- Patrice Vecchione, ed. (2007). Faith and Doubt: An Anthology of Poems. Patrice Vecchione. Macmillan. ISBN 978-0-8050-8213-5.
References
- "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2011-07-19. Retrieved 2009-06-16.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) - "SIUC Department of English Faculty". Archived from the original on 2009-06-12. Retrieved 2009-06-16.
- "Judy Jordan joins SIUC's creative writing program". news.siuc.edu. Archived from the original on 12 July 2012. Retrieved 22 May 2022.
- "Judy Jordan at Guilford - Features - Guilfordian - Guilford College". media.www.guilfordian.com. Archived from the original on 11 July 2011. Retrieved 22 May 2022.
- "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2009-10-15. Retrieved 2009-06-16.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) - "August 1996 : Poetry Magazine". poetryfoundation.org.
- "National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry". comcast.net. Archived from the original on 2012-06-30.