Jane Cooper (1924-2007)
Jane Cooper (1924-2007), feminist writer and teacher, received a bachelor’s degree at the University of Wisconsin and a master’s degree at the University of Iowa, where she studied with poets John Berryman and Robert Lowell. She began teaching at Sarah Lawrence College in 1950, where she helped establish the school’s creative writing program. In her poems, Cooper wrote about the challenges of being a female writer and a woman in the decades following World War II. Some of her writings are biographical, illuminating the creative lives, works and struggles of female artists such as painter Georgia O’Keeffe in The Winter Road and writer Willa Cather in Vocation: A Life.
Cooper’s debut poetry collection, The Weather of Six Mornings (1969), was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. Her other works include Green Notebook, Winter Road (1994), The Flashboat: Poems Collected and Reclaimed (2000), and three more books of poetry. Cooper won a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1960 and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She retired from teaching in 1987 and was the school’s emeritus poet in residence at the time of her death in 2007.
