Jean Valentine is the author of nine books, her most recent collection, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965 - 2003, is the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the NEA, The Bunting Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, The New York Council for the Arts, and The New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as the Maurice English Prize, the Teasdale Poetry Prize, and The Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize in 2000. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Graduate Writing Program of New York University, Columbia University, and the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan.

Other poems from 5 AM in Verse Daily:
June 24, 2005:  "When the River Comes Toward Me" Nance Van Winckel
November 11, 2004:  "Niagara Falls Jumper Explains" by Karla M. Huston
July 3, 2004:  "Bottle Gentian" by Kasey Jueds
June 21, 2004:  "Intertextuality" by Tami Haaland
March 6, 2004:  "Bone Poem" by Heather Davis
February 18, 2004:  "Monsoon" by Mike Dockins
June 9, 2003:  "In Gwendolyn Brooks' Head" by Yona Harvey
December 24, 2002:  "By their works" by Bob Hicok

About 5 AM:
Poets in this issue: Patricia Dobler, Janet Kaplan, Laurie Zimmerman, Jules Nyguist, Jean Valentine, Remica Lasharra Bingham, Jerry Roscoe, Roger Mitchell, Laurence W. Thomas, Kendra Kopelke, Richard Solomon, Ron Koertge, Kathleen Rooney, Becky Flannagan, Fred Voss, Christopher Buckley, Eitan Kadosh, Michael Estabrook, Susan Terris, Francesca Bell, Maxine Scates, Nina Forsythe, Judith Strasser, Gerald Locklin, Jessica Goodfellow, Kasey Jueds, Anne Ward Jamieson, Aimee Nezhukumatatil, Elaine Terranova, Chris Green, Marc Harshman, Paul Martin, Tim Suermondt, Ed Galing, James Haug, Jamie Ross, Howard Faerstein, David Fenza, Philip Terman, George Held, David Harbilas, A. D. Winans, Aaron Smith, Susan Sheppard, Linda Elkin, Anita Gevaudan Byerly, Joan Larkin, Louis McKee, Anne Waldman