Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections

Imagine being a young poet, nurturing your craft without the benefit of established mentors. Imagine having never been in a class taught by a woman poet or not having a bookshelf filled with books written by living women poets. Luckily, young women poets today don’t have to. Arielle Greenberg and Rachel Zucker’s
Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections
collects both personal essays and representative poems by women born after 1960 whose careers were influenced - directly or indirectly - by the women who preceded them.The poets in this collection describe a new kind of influence, one less hierarchical, less patriarchal, and less anxious than forms of mentorship in the past. Vivid and intelligent, these twenty-four essays explore the complicated nature of the mentoring relationship, with all its joys and difficulties, and show how this new sense of writing out of female experience and within a community of writers has fundamentally changed women’s poetry.It includes: Jenny Factor on Marilyn Hacker; Beth Ann Fennelly on Denise Duhamel; Miranda Field on Fanny Howe; Katie Ford on Jorie Graham; Joy Katz on Sharon Olds; Valerie Martinez on Joy Harjo; Erika Meitner on Rita Dove; Aimee Nezhukumatathil on Naomi Shihab Nye; Eleni Sikelianos on Alice Notley; Tracy K. Smith on Lucie Brock-Broido; Crystal Williams on Lucille Clifton; and Rebecca Wolff on Molly Peacock.