Jeanne Murray Walker teaches at The University of Delaware, where she heads the Creative Writing Program and she also serves as a Mentor in the Seattle Pacific University low residence MFA Program.  She has written seven collections of poetry, among them, A Deed To the Light, Coming Into History and New Tracks, Night Falling.   Her poetry is widely published in journals like  Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, Image and Best American Poetry.  In theatres across the United States and in London her scripts have been performed. They are archived in North American Women’s Drama. Among her plays are “Stories From The National Enquirer” and “Inventing Montana,” both published by Dramatic Publishing Company.

An Atlantic Monthly Fellow at Bread Loaf School of English, Jeanne has also been awarded a Pew Fellowship in The Arts, an NEA Fellowship, eight Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships, The Glenna Luschei-Prairie Schooner Prize and other awards for her poetry and scripts. She serves on the Editorial Boards of Shenandoah and Image magazines and for 20 years she was the Poetry Editor of Christianity and Literature.  She is currently serving on the Board of that organization.

Jeanne has appeared on PBS television and is frequently interviewed on the radio.  She lectures, teaches, and gives readings in across the country and abroad in places ranging from The Library of Congress and Oxford University, to Whidbey Island and Texas canyon country, to Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj, Romania.  Her work has been distributed across Pennsylvania on posters by The Center for the Book and has appeared on buses and trains with Poetry in Motion.

Jeanne collaborated on the editing of Shadow and Light: Literature and the Life of Faith, an historical anthology of literature which Image magazine called the current “stand-out, single-volume” on the subject of spiritual questing.”

Born in Parkers Prairie, a village in northern Minnesota, Jeanne attended Wheaton College and then earned a PhD in English at The University of Pennsylvania.  She and her husband, Dan Larkin, are the parents of two children and three grandchildren.  Jeanne estimates that she has carried truckloads of groceries into her kitchen in Philadelphia, where, she figures, she has made 13,207 dinners for her children and grandchildren.