virtual artists collective poetry
Judith Valente is an on air correspondent for PBS-TV and Chicago Public Radio and contributing correspondent for National Public Radio. She worked previously as a staff writer for The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and People magazine. She is the author of the poetry chapbook, "Inventing An Alphabet," selected by Mary Oliver for the 2004 Aldrich Poetry Prize. She is co-editor with her husband, Charles Reynard, of Twenty Poems to Nourish Your Soul (Loyola Press, 2005), an anthology of poems and reflections on finding the sacred in the everyday, winner of a 2008 Eric Hoffer Book Award citation. She is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Poetry Award and the Jo-Anne Hirshfield Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in TriQuarterly, Comstock Review, Ninth Letter, Free Lunch, Rhino, AfterHours, Illinois Poets: Where We Live, and Best Catholic Writing of 2004. She has given workshops across the country exploring the connection between poetry and photography and poetry and spirituality. She is currently at work on a non-fiction book about contemporary monastic life.
"Judith Valente's [poems] are rich, own their own beauty and offer themeselves abundantly to metaphor. Ms. Valente has constructed an active and even frisky language, pulling into the poem references and allusions that tease our minds as they amplify the poem's subject and mood and landscape. We are engaged and unravel the poems therefore in a kind of rickrack stroll, enjoying the fulsome ride toward summation." Mary Oliver
interview with Donna Seaman on Eight Forty-Eight, WBEZ, Chicago, 29 July 2009
James Reiss review on Gently Read Literature