Deena Linett​: What Winter Means

Deena Linett’s Translucent When Fired: New & Selected Poems, forthcoming from Tiger Bark Press in Spring, 2017, adds new poems to work from three previous collections. An early poem, “The Power of Place,” which appeared in Harvard Magazine, prefigures the importance of place for Linett.

Fellowships to Hawthornden Castle, Scotland, led to her first two volumes of poetry, Rare Earths, composed primarily of fictive letters in the voices of Scottish island women over 250 years, and Woman Crossing a Field, in which many of the poems respond to her work in Belfast, and explorations in the Orkneys and the Western Isles of Scotland. The third poetry collection, The Gates of Visby, grew from her residency at the Baltic Centere for Writers and Translators on Gotland, an island in the Baltic Sea off Sweden.

While earning her doctorate at Rutgers University, Linett had the first of two fellowships to Yaddo, where she completed her first novel, On Common Ground, co-winner of the Associated Writing Programs Award Series in the novel. The second Yaddo fellowship led to the completion of her prize-winning novel, The Translator’s Wife.

Born in Boston, Linett grew up on the Gulf coast of Florida. She lived for many years in northern New Jersey (where from her windows she could see New York, and the smoke when the Towers fell), and taught at Montclair State University. She lives now in Indiana.