Moira Linehan
Encyclopedia
Moira Linehan is an American poet
. She graduated from Boston College
, and Vermont College of Fine Arts
, with an MFA.
She lived in Winchester, Massachusetts
, where she worked as an academic administrator. She has been a resident at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Millay Colony.
Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Green Mountains Review, Indiana Review, and Notre Dame Review, Triquarterly.
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
. She graduated from Boston College
Boston College
Boston College is a private Jesuit research university located in the village of Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, USA. The main campus is bisected by the border between the cities of Boston and Newton. It has 9,200 full-time undergraduates and 4,000 graduate students. Its name reflects its early...
, and Vermont College of Fine Arts
Vermont College of Fine Arts
Vermont College of Fine Arts offers four distinct graduate programs, awarding Master of Fine Arts degrees in Visual Art, Writing, Writing for Children & Young Adults and Graphic Design. The student to faculty ratio at VCFA is 4-to-1.. The faculty and alumni of VCFA have won many literary awards,...
, with an MFA.
She lived in Winchester, Massachusetts
Winchester, Massachusetts
Winchester is a town located in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, eight miles north of Boston. With its agricultural roots having mostly disappeared, it is now an affluent suburb...
, where she worked as an academic administrator. She has been a resident at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Millay Colony.
Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, Green Mountains Review, Indiana Review, and Notre Dame Review, Triquarterly.
Honors and awards
- 2006 Crab Orchard AwardCrab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition AwardsThe Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Awards are relatively large prizes given out each year to poets with unpublished manuscripts. In addition to the cash prizes, two winners get published by a university press....
- 2001 Honorable mention Thomas Merton Prize of Poetry of the Sacred
Review
Many poets, I presume, write with ghosts around them. Moira Linehan writes in the company of her husband’s ghost—made a ghost by succumbing to a four-year fight with cancer. Linehan invites the intrusion of her husband into many of her poems and even when she tries to uninvite him, Linehan and the reader realize that he is the permanent resident of her pages. Rarely is the process of grief so heartbreakingly rendered. Elisabeth Kübler-RossElisabeth Kübler-RossElisabeth Kübler-Ross, M.D. was a Swiss American psychiatrist, a pioneer in Near-death studies and the author of the groundbreaking book On Death and Dying , where she first discussed what is now known as the Kübler-Ross model.She is a 2007 inductee into the American National Women's Hall of Fame...
could not have more accurately transferred the stages of grief into poetry. In her opening poem Linehan makes it clear that the reader, also, will be kept company by a haunting: “keep in mind, no matter where / this story goes, there’s a body / at the bottom of the quarry.” There is no avoiding this body as Linehan gradually closes the gap between the words, “absence,” and “presence.”