Women Poets on Mentorship

Imagine being a young poet, nurturing your craft without the benefit of established mentors. Imagine having never been in a class taught by a woman poet or not having a bookshelf filled with books written by living women poets. Luckily, young women poets today don't have to. Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker's Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections collects both personal essays and representative poems by women born after 1960 whose careers were influenced--directly or indirectly--by the women who preceded them. The poets in this collection describe a new kind of influence, one less hierarchical, less patriarchal, and less anxious than forms of mentorship in the past. Vivid and intelligent, these twenty-four essays explore the complicated nature of the mentoring relationship, with all its joys and difficulties, and show how this new sense of writing out of female experience and within a community of writers has fundamentally changed women's poetry. Includes:

Jenny Factor on Marilyn Hacker

Beth Ann Fennelly on Denise Duhamel

Miranda Field on Fanny Howe

Katie Ford on Jorie Graham

Joy Katz on Sharon Olds

Valerie Martinez on Joy Harjo

Erika Meitner on Rita Dove

Aimee Nezhukumatathil on Naomi Shihab Nye

Eleni Sikelianos on Alice Notley

Tracy K. Smith on Lucie Brock-Broido

Crystal Williams on Lucille Clifton

Rebecca Wolff on Molly Peacock