Jane Mead is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently World of Made and Unmade (Alice James, 2016) which was nominated for a National Book Award, as well as a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize and the Griffin Prize in Poetry. Her poems appear regularly in journals and anthologies, and she’s the recipient of a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Whiting Writers Award, and a Lannan Foundation Completion Grant. For many years Poet-in-Residence at Wake Forest University, she manages her family’s ranch in northern California. She has taught as a visiting writer at Washington University, Colby College and most recently, The University of Iowa. She passed away in September of 2019.

“In her fifth book [World of Made and Unmade]. . . Mead performs a sustained feat of imagination. We are given details of a harrowing present, as ‘the patient’s’ selfhood dissipates, yet still renavigates the past and peers into an unforgiving future.”
—The Los Angeles Times

Mead propels readers forward, using plain language that’s elegant in its simplicity yet compelling and heartbreaking. Even as she confronts grief and loss, the poet highlights the overriding theme of courage.”
—Library Journal

“World of Made and Unmade is a deep blue yarn of very fine thread. We know much of poetry ever was and ever shall be elegiac. Jane Mead’s poem could be neither more literal nor nearer the verge of appearing a little too perfect for this world. As the laundry room floods and the grape harvest gets done; as Michoacán waits for another time, her beautiful, practical mother is dying. Ashes are scattered in the pecan groves of her own Rincon, her own corner of the world, and the poet, in elementary script, draws a sustaining record of the only feeling worth the struggle, and she cannot, will not, does not fuck it up.”
—C.D. Wright

“In love and in dying, Zeno’s paradox proves to be neither paradoxical nor absurd. Rather, it vivifies each point of time into a sword-point, a needle point, a keen glint on a hillside, piercing eternity. In Jane Mead’s World of Made and Unmade, we find distances we’d never expected in the gilded lapse of time. And Mead sets these distances into motion, into a cinema of true feeling and insuperable dignity. Life is unassailable in death, and Jane Mead proves it so.”
—Donald Revell