Featured on November 20, 1999

Jane Glazer grew up in small-town Iowa, in a large family, among animals and books. Her father was a veterinarian; her mother an artist. Jane was widowed at 30 but went back to earn an MA in English Literature while raising three children. After a Fulbright year in Dublin, Ireland, and a two-year Peace Corps stint in South America, she taught in Eugene and Portland schools for twenty years. During that time, she began to publish her poetry in small journals.

Her first book of poems, Some Trick of Light, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Awards in 1994. Her work has been described as "poems of precise observation and social conscience, informed by an educated sensibility and a first-rate mind."

Poems from Some Trick of Light take us to Ireland, Russia, Italy, and Beijing. The first poems in her book are dramatic and provide description of foreign lands with painfully stark commentary. The book’s second section delves into family memories, deaths of grandparents, and the suicide of her husband. The poems are tender and unpretentious, with no trace of the melodramatic.

A second collection, Moles and Mausoleums, is ready for publication.