Jane Satterfield, who judged the 2014 Essay category of the William Faulkner-Wiliam Wisdom Creative Writing Competition, is a previous winner of the Society’s Gold Medal for Best Essay. She is author of the recently released narrative non-fiction book, Daughters of Empire: A Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond.
A highly accomplished poet, her most recent collection is Her Familiars, published in 2013 by Elixir Press. Her poem Elegy with Trench Art and Asanas won the 2013 49th Parallel Award from The Bellingham Review She is the author of two previous books of poems: Assignation at Vanishing Point, and Shepherdess with an Automatic. Her other awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry, the Florida Review Editors’ Prize in nonfiction, and the Mslexia women’s poetry prize.
In 2013, she was awarded the 49th Parallel Poetry Prize from The Bellingham Review for her poem Elegy with Trench Art and Asanas. Satterfield is the literary editor for the Journal of the Motherhood Initiative and she teaches at Loyola University Maryland. In a lengthy review praising Jane’s work, The Common, an on-line journal, had this to say:
Throughout her impressive body of work, which includes three collections of poetry and a memoir, Jane Satterfield explores the roles of place and gender in human identity. Born in England and raised in America, she probes what it means to reconcile the legacies of intertwined lineages. Satterfield complicates her inquiry into cultural inheritance by emphasizing female experience. In her first poetry book, Shepherdess with an Automatic, she described her youthful adventures during the 1980s; “going to clubs” in “boots with zip-laces to accelerate the kill” (in contrast to1950s housewives “decked out” like “living dolls”). Her Familiars, Satterfield’s most recent collection, takes us further back in time, to the 1970s.
We glimpse her as a girl scout, part of a “troop of girls kitted out in jumpers, cable knee socks, & small green berets,” living “blissful on suburban streets” while “choppers stuttered over Saigon.” Both books, as well as her second poetry collection, Assignation at Vanishing Point, combine coming-of-age material with adulthood examinations of love, sex, child rearing, historical influence, and literary ambition. In Her Familiars, Satterfield widens her range of subject matter, tones, and aesthetic approaches, mining the territory between domestic and public life in striking new ways.
For the entire review of her new book of poetry, visit: http://www.thecommononline.org/category/tags/jane-satterfield
Jane Satterfield accepted the invitation of the Faulkner Society to judge
the 2014 Essay Category of the William Faulkner – William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition.