Jan Beatty

Who is Jan Beatty?

Jan Beatty is an American poet. Her most recent poetry collection is The Switching/Yard, and her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including Quarterly West, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, and Court Green, and in anthologies published by Oxford University Press, University of Illinois Press, and University of Iowa Press. Her honors include fellowships from the Ucross Foundation, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and Yaddo. She was awarded the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry from the Tulsa Arts and Humanities Council in 1990, and the $15,000 Creative Achievement Award in Literature from the Heinz Foundation. Her first book, Mad River, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize of the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1994. Some of Beatty's poetry, considered sexually explicit, led to problems with a scheduled reading at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in April 2008.

Beatty currently heads the writing program at Carlow University, where she also directs the Madwomen in the Attic Writing Workshop. She has also taught creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh.