Jane Mead

Jane Mead was the author of five collections of poetry: The Lord and the General Din of the World (1996), The House of Poured-Out Waters (2001), The Usable Field (2008), Money Money Money Water Water Water (2014), World of Mad and Unmade (2016), and To the Wren: Collected and New Poems (2019). Her later work engaged the Western landscape, ecology, and the debts of ancestry: she managed her family’s farm in Northern California, where she grew zinfandel and cabernet wine grapes. In his review of Money Money Money Water Water Water, Jeff Hamilton noted, “Mead’s poetic compass, then, leads her not in circles, but toward a horizon of tragic speech,” adding that she “writes georgics in a confessional mode.”
 
Mead earned a BA at Vassar College, an MA at Syracuse University, and an MFA at the University of Iowa. She received awards and fellowships from the Lannan, Whiting, and Guggenheim foundations. She taught at Colby College, Washington University, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Drew University Low-Residency MFA program, and was for many years poet-in-residence at Wake Forest University. She died in 2019.