Jane Gentry Vance
Kentucky Poet Laureate
2007 -
2008
Jane Gentry Vance (published as Jane Gentry) was born and
raised in central Kentucky, which has deeply influenced her writing. She has a
distinguished career blending her work as a poet and as an educator.
Vance began teaching at Georgetown College in 1964. She joined the
faculty of the University of Kentucky in 1972; was awarded tenure and promoted
to Associate Professor to the Honors Program in 1977; was jointly appointed to
the English Department in 1988; promoted to Full Professor in 1997 and was
appointed to the English Graduate Faculty in 2005. She continues to teach at
the University of Kentucky.
Vance is the author of Portrait of the
Artist as a White Pig, a collection of 50 poems, published by Louisiana
State University Press in 2006; A Year in Kentucky: A Garland of Poems,
a collection of 12 poems published by Press Eight Seventeen in 2005; and A
Garden in Kentucky, a collection of 60 poems, published by Louisiana State
University Press in 1995. Her poems have also been published in notable
anthologies and journals such as the Sewanee Review, Harvard Magazine,
Southern Poetry Review, the American Voice and Humanities in the
South.
Among the many awards Vance has received are: Finalist for
the Heartland Review Poetry Prize; the Kentucky Arts Council’s
Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship for poetry (1992 and 2003); a
Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellowship; a Yaddo Fellowship
and a Voices and Visions grant from the National Endowment for the
Humanities and the American Library Association.
Vance received her BA
degree in1963 from Hollins College in Virginia, a MA degree in 1966 from
Brandeis University in Massachusetts and her Ph.D. in English and American
Literature in 1978 from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Jane
Gentry Vance is a long time resident and active community member of Versailles,
Kentucky.
Kentucky Arts Council
500 Mero
Street
21st Floor, Capital Plaza Tower
Frankfort, KY
40601
502-564-3757
Toll Free: 888-833-2787
FAX:
502-564-2839
Page Updated: 06/26/2008
