Newsletter sign up

Be the first to know when new American Life in Poetry columns are live.

J. Allyn Rosser

Athens, Ohio

J. Allyn Rosser was born in Pennsylvania. She attended Middlebury College in Vermont and earned a PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. Her works include Bright Moves (1990), winner of the Morse Poetry Prize; Misery Prefigured (2001), winner of the Crab Orchard Award; Foiled Again (2007), winner of the New Criterion Poetry Prize; and Mimi’s Trapeze (2014). Her poetry has also been published in such periodicals as The Atlantic MonthlyPoetry magazine, and the Paris Review. She has received awards and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ohio State Arts Council. Rosser is a professor of English at Ohio University, where she served as the editor of the New Ohio Review for eight years. She lives in Athens, Ohio.

By J. Allyn Rosser

Column 559

Pelicans in December