Judith Harris | |
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Born | Washington, D.C. |
Nationality | American |
Alma mater |
University of Maryland, Brown University George Washington University |
Genre | poetry |
Judith Harris is an American poet and the author of Night Garden (Tiger Bark Press, 2013), Atonement (LSU, 2000), The Bad Secret (LSU, 2006), and the critical book Signifying Pain: Constructing and Healing the Self Through Writing (SUNY, 2003). Her poetry has appeared in many publications, including The Nation, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Slate, Southern Review, Image, Boulevard, Narrative, Verse Daily, and American Life in Poetry. She has taught at the Frost Place and at universities in the Washington, D.C. area.
Judith Harris was born in Washington, D.C. and received a B.A. from University of Maryland, her M.A. from Brown University in Creative Writing, and a Ph.D. from George Washington University in American literature. She has taught at George Washington, Catholic University, George Mason University, and American University, and held residencies at VCCA and Frost Place.
In 2000, LSU Press published Atonement and her second book, The Bad Secret, in 2006. Her renowned critical book, Signifying Pain: Construction and Healing the Self through Writing published by SUNY Press and is taught in many graduate seminars.Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, coauthor of Cherishment: A Psychology of the Heart, said, "Signifying Pain will play an important role in the growing literature on psychoanalysis in education and in the college classroom, as it both shows and tells what a psychoanalytically informed sensibility can bring to understanding poetry. To be able to signify pain is a human triumph; to write about the signifying is, too."
Her third, and most recent, collection of poetry, Night Garden, was published April 2013 by Tiger Bark Press, a literary press founded by Steven Huff, previously the executive director of BOA Editions. On Night Garden, Edward Hirsch said, “Judith Harris creates tableaux of memory and shines a keen light on the particulars of the natural world in these poignant, carefully observed, and scrupulously written poems that ache with mortality. Night Garden is an illuminating book!” Jeanne Marie Beaumont said, “Piercingly visionary and subtly hallucinatory, over and over these poems acknowledge the vast mysterious companionship of the natural world and the fluidity of experienced time. As the poems bring things to notice, whether the hum of Sears fans, the oddments on a basement worktable, or the smell of a pharmacy aisle, they create a new way to be intimate with the physical world. It is as though Keats's “hark!” has awoken this poet to her fullest senses, and there is no turning away. Night Garden is dug deep and flourishing.”