Poetry Reading: Judy Rowe Michaels

The award-winning poet and retired Princeton Day School educator reads from "This Morning the Mountain," her fourth volume of poetry. Refreshments and book signing to follow.

About the Book:

Judy Rowe Michaels’ sixth bout of cancer coincided with a deeper grief: her husband’s sudden death, the end of a 44-year marriage. Yet the poems in "This Morning the Mountain," in their various turnings, reveal unexpected moments of comfort, resilience, even laughter: the pet cat’s growling capture of a broiled shrimp, “like the fierce hunter he was meant to be”; an arresting improvisation by a favorite jazz pianist; a prisoner’s empathic insight about a poem — “I guess cancer could be a prison too.” Ranging from villanelle to prose poem to irregular stanzas that surge, stumble or sprawl across a page, these poems find the music to explore not only our natural fears of loneliness, insufficiency, heartbreak and death, but the celebration of love.

About Judy Rowe Michaels: 

Dr. Judy Rowe Michaels, a Geraldine R. Dodge poet in the schools and for many years poet in residence, English teacher, and coordinator of aesthetic education at Princeton Day School, has published three poetry collections, "The Forest of Wild Hands" (University Press of Florida), "Reviewing the Skull"(WordTech Editions), and the chapbook "Ghost Notes" (Finishing Line Press), as well as three books on teaching poetry and writing. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, Hedgebrook, The Banff Centre for the Arts, and the New Jersey State Arts Council. In 2015 New Jersey Poetry Journal awarded her their NJ Poets Prize. She has won the Varoujan Award from the New England Poetry Club and twice been a finalist in Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda competition. Michaels has given poetry workshops for teachers around the country, presented frequently at the National Council of Teachers of English annual convention, and served for three years on NCTE’S poetry committee. A seven-time cancer patient, she gives talks on ovarian cancer to New Jersey and New York medical school classes for the national program Survivors Teaching Students. She is a founding member of Cool Women, a critique group and performance ensemble based in Princeton. Judy lives on a ridge of the Sourland Mountains in central New Jersey with her Maine Coon cat, but since retirement spends four months every year at her family’s cabin on Lake Kezar in Maine.

Presented with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this programming do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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