WELCOME!

The latest news:  On November 7, 2023 Jeanne’s memoir, Leaping from the Burning Train: A Poet’s Journey of Faith will be published by Slant Books. You can choose from several options to pre-order the book on the Slant website

Jeanne Murray Walker is the award-winning author of 9 volumes of
poetry and one memoir as well as a number of plays which have been
performed in theaters across the country and in London. She is an
Emeritus Professor at The University of Delaware, where she taught
for 40 years and headed the Creative Writing Concentration.  Jeanne
currently serves as a poetry Mentor in The Seattle Pacific Low
Residency MFA Program
.  From her home outside Philadelphia
she blogs about the troubling politics of our time, reading and writing,
and the surprising power of stillness.   She travels widely to speak
and read her poems in places ranging from The Library of Congress
to Romania, from Italy to Texas Canyon Country. You can find her
papers and letters archived at Wheaton College’s Buswell Library
and at The University of Delaware’s Morris Library. Jeanne has
appeared on PBS television and is frequently interviewed on the radio.

A Note from Jeanne

I’m delighted you’ve stopped by. Please linger a while to browse. Read some poems. Check out my blog and speaking schedule.  If you’re near an event where I’ll be speaking, feel free to attend. If you’d like to read my blog click here.  We can join forces to work for a more thoughtful world.

Jeanne Murray Walker

THE NURSES

–for Jean Fergusson
I can hear them in there, laughing, the nurses on the children’s cancer ward, as I walk through, my heart snagged on a child in room 206, the boat of my hopes tipping its freight into the water, because kids in here are dying, like trees turning in the fall so slowly that we have to dwell on each interval of suffering. The door opens a slice and I see nurses leaning into laughter, collapsing, gripping each other’s arms.  Their laughter skates on air, it fills the room up, it towers above us.  I shut the door. They laugh because grief adheres to them as desire adheres to beautiful women.  They have to pick it from their fur.  They have to help each other comb it out.  They study jokes as farm girls study dresses in a catalogue.  They balance on a high beam of laughter, knowing  if they laugh they might come back tomorrow.