Her eleventh book of poetry, Break the Glass, was published in 2010 by Copper Canyon Press, and was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965 - 2003 was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry.
She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College for over 30 years and has has also taught at the Graduate Writing Program of New York University, Columbia University and the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan.
Valentine was born in Chicago, earned her B.A. from Radcliffe College, and has lived most of her life in New York City. She won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. She was the State Poet of New York from 2008-10 and received the 2009 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation, the New York Council for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as the Maurice English Prize, the Teasdale Poetry Prize and the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize in 2000.
Internationally known poet and National Book Award recipient Jean Valentine reads from her work as part of the Spirit Lake Poetry Series.
