RIP Jane Mead (1958-2019)

Last week we were saddened by the news of the death of poet Jane Mead, who died at her home in Napa, California on September 8th. The Napa Valley Register remembers Mead, writing:

Much of Mead’s poetry was informed by her devotion to the land, a bond deepened in 2003 when, following the death of her father, she left her position as tenured Poet in Residence at Wake Forest University to oversee the management of her family’s vineyard, Mead Ranch, in Napa. A recent review of To the Wren in Publishers Weekly noted “The natural world, in its bounty and brutality, is a grounding force for Mead, a reminder of a time scale beyond the human span.”

Mead’s fifth book, World of Made and Unmade, an account of her mother’s dying, was long-listed for the National Book Award and a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize, about which the judge’s citation stated “Her language serves loss as a bell serves its chime….These resonant poems discover what it means to live, die, and come home again.”

Mead was the recipient of grants from the Lannan Foundation, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Her poems appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Poetry, New England Review, Colorado Review, Virginia Quarterly, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, and The Best American Poetry, among other publications and anthologies.

Read on at Napa Valley Register, then head to Mead's author page to celebrate her life with a poem.