Deborah Warren was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1946 and educated at Harvard University, from where she graduated with a BA in English. She spent fifteen years working as a teacher of Latin and English, and ten years as a software engineer, but she and her husband, who have nine children, now raise heifers on a farm in Vermont, while living across the border in Massachusetts. Although Warren only began writing poetry seven years ago, her work has been published in a wide variety of journals and has also won a number of prestigious awards. The Size of Happiness is her first book.

About The Size of Happiness:

"If there are still people out there clinging to that old canard about the tendency of formal verse to inhibit the poet, they need this book. It's full of poems — fresh, quirky, intelligent, moving, individual and spoken in the living voice of the present — that attest to the inexhaustible capacity of rhyme and meter to serve the needs of every age. There are poems here that draw their material from daily life, the Bible, history and legend, the observation of nature, this morning's paper, memory, the world of art and music, and the bottomless well of parental concern.

Deborah Warren's themes are those that never age or lose their bite: the joys and perils of each day, the risks imposed by love, the preparation for aging and death. The language is beautiful and precise and — equally important — determined to communicate with the rest of us.

Come to think of it, the rest of us — those who have never doubted that formal excellence is an asset – also need it, for the sheer delight of reading it. In fact, let me say this outright: everybody who can read needs this book."
— Rhina P. Espaillat

"What I like about Deborah Warren's superb new collection is that I can read it from start to finish with enjoyment. The poems combine imagination with intelligence, music with emotional energy. The language sparkles in poem after poem. The book is full of lines and stanzas that the reader simply must linger over to savor. I know of no other, truer, test of poetry than that it demands a place in one's memory."
—Dana Gioia

"Deborah Warren is among the very finest American poets who still observe the strictures of meter and rhyme. She informs her work with lively feeling, wit, wisdom, and memorable music; she keeps us sitting up and interested. This collection, long overdue, is sure to find readers who will cherish it."
— X.J. Kennedy