Nancy White grew up bouncing around the country until adolescence, when her family settled back near its roots in Cambridge, New York. She attended Oberlin and received her MFA at Sarah Lawrence. Her first book, Sun, Moon, Salt, won The Washington Prize for Poetry. She serves as Associate Editor at The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review and Editor at The Word Works in Washington DC. She teaches at Adirondack Community College, after wonderful stints at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn and at Bennington College. Happily returned to Cambridge, New York, she lives with her husband and son, tending the same gardens her grand-mother planted. She has painted the farmhouse walls red, green, yellow, blue.

Other poems by Nancy White in Verse Daily:
October 4, 2008:   "Woven and Sewn" "You are no virgin, listen. You must stop here...."

Books by Nancy White:

Other poems on the web by Nancy White:
Two poems

About Detour:

"Nancy White’s Detour is fierce, feminist, fantastic. Her wit, her precision, the threads of her narratives make beautiful and whole what is torn. Her deft syntactic disruptions mirror the domestic theater of these poems. A cougar, a poet of grace and wonder, Nancy White writes poems that are substantial, intelligent, stylistically marvelous."
—Denise Duhamel

"These are poems about taking the long way around, and learning in that difficult process that you are part of a richly varied “fabric woven and sewn.” No linear consciousness or straight-laced poetry could ever make us feel, as these poems so wonderfully do, the jagged, painful work of soul-creation. Here are sharply-focused glimpses of sensuality and alliance, loss and betrayal, endurance and devotion. Here too is love and language that will surprise you. Take this detour with Nancy White happily. You'll be grateful when you see where and what it has brought you."
—Fred Marchant