Julia Carter Aldrich was born in Webster Groves, Missouri in 1930, the namesake of her great-grandmother, Julia Carter Aldrich (1834-1924), pioneer poet and writer from Wauseon, Ohio. In 1939 a 'red scare' was alarming the 'progressive educators' of the St. Louis School System, and her father was among those who were moving on to more welcoming environs. For her family it was to the rich life of Greenwich Village and New York University. She would publish her first poem, at sixteen, in Seventeen Magazine.

Books by Julia Carter Aldrich:

Other poems on the web by Julia Carter Aldrich:
"Feminini"

About Life Lines:

"In this rich and moving collection, Julia Carter Aldrich offers poems that have been her 'life lines'. In her first poem, she sees three women friends as poets — or perhaps they are the three muses of antiquity! One by one, they remember – '. . . tears streaming from the inland seas of their blue transparent dark rimmed eyes.' Her voice rings with words and sounds that celebrate lives that are 'brusque and hardy from wind and burning. Like scrub pine.' In the last poem of this collection, 'The Verge', the poet offers a new promise of song, perhaps in the voice of her daughter, who died in her twenty third year – a 'younger song that goes ahead/girl-god and angel-bit; tall daughter, bred/strong-legged, following the shore' who says 'Love's the charm, and Paradise the door'. And we recall an earlier poem, 'Riding Down from Shadom', where the poet herself is a young woman, riding her bike down a road to a harbor place where 'sweetened by water, and song' she is 'settled more deeply into darkness, to be blessed.' Throughout this book, Julia Carter Aldrich's poetry takes us along, making her poems ours, so that we are 'riding down from Shadom' with her."
—Phyllis Beck Katz