Vanessa Haley has been a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Sweet Briar and was the first recipient of the John Haines Award for Poetry in 2001. Her poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies, including Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Karamu, The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Hampden-Sydney Review, Reading Poems: An Anthology of Poetry (Random House), and Poetry from Sojourner: A Feminist Anthology (University of Illinois Press). She lives in Wilmington, Delaware, where she is a psychotherapist. Prior to this, she was an associate professor of English at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

About The Logic of Wings:

"To remember, the poet’s sacred duty, is honored so wisely and profoundly in this book that Vanessa Haley’s memories become our memories. The family that time has taken from her in a hush of wings is brought back with such a deft touch that the lost father or the benevolent mother look out at us through these poems and become our own. She is, to take a line from one of her poems, ‘articulating the particulars of absence’ (and renewal) with the scope of the historian and the eye of the scientist, and especially with the skill of a master wordsmith. Reaching out for the ineffable, searching for grace and for order, does indeed lead to a logic only a good poet could discover. And Vanessa Haley is one of the best."
—Tom O’Grady

"Everything is reassembled,’ writes Vanessa Haley in these beautiful, lyrical, and storied poems made both from memory and attentive observation, these accounts of ‘what/ we’ve always had and what we’ve already lost.’ In her remarkable debut collection, Haley achieves and sustains an extraordinary and graceful balance between the forces of wildness and containment. Her poems take to heart Rilke’s injunction to praise that which is transient and passing, and, in doing so, her poems vibrate with quiet and passionate intensities."
—Richard McCann

"Haley welcomes the hope that accompanies death’s inevitable pull ‘toward an abstraction called light.’ This is an authentic and courageous voice—a welcome addition to the stage of poetry."
—Carolyn Kreiter-Foronda