Alice Corbin Henderson

Who was Alice Corbin Henderson?

Alice Corbin Henderson was an American poet, author and poetry editor.

Alice Corbin was born in St. Louis, Missouri. Her mother died in 1884 and she was briefly sent to live with her father's cousin Alice Mallory Richardson in Chicago before returning to her father in Kansas after his remarriage in 1891.

Alice Corbin attended the University of Chicago, and in 1898 published a collection of poetry The Linnet Songs. In 1904 she rented a studio in the Academy of Fine Arts in Chicago, and it was there she met her future husband, William Penhallow Henderson, a painter, architect and furniture designer, who was teaching there at the time. They married on October 14, 1905.

In 1912 her second collection of poems, The Spinning Woman of the Sky, was published, and she became assistant editor to Harriet Monroe at Poetry Magazine. She left Chicago for Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1916, after having been diagnosed with tuberculosis. She continued working on Poetry Magazine by long distance until 1922.

Alice Corbin Henderson and her husband were devoted to New Mexico and the Southwest. They were active in the civil rights of Native Americans. She published Red Earth, Poems of New Mexico in 1920 and The Turquoise Trail, an Anthology of New Mexico Poetry in 1928. In 1937 William Penhallow Henderson designed what is now called the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in the form of a traditional Navajo hogan and Alice Corbin Henderson was curator of the museum.