Jane Chance

Jane Chance, Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Professor Emerita at Rice University and recipient of a D.Litt. from Purdue University in 2013, published her first book of poems, Only Begetter, in 2014 (White Violet Press). Author of twenty-four scholarly books and over a hundred articles and reviews on Old and Middle English literature, medieval women, mythography, and medievalism, she has received Guggenheim and NEH Fellowships, membership at the Institute for Advanced Study- Princeton, a Rockefeller Foundation residency at Bellagio, and book and article prizes for her work. Her edited collection Tolkien the Medievalist twice received runner-up for the best book prize by the Mythopoeic Society; she has also published two monographs on Tolkien and two other edited collections and appeared briefly in two full-length documentary films on Tolkien. Her new book on "Tolkien, Self and Other: 'This Queer Creature,'" will be published fall 2016.

Her poems have appeared in many little magazines, including Antigonish Review, Ariel, Dalhousie Review, Degenerates: Voices for Peace, Icarus (Trinity College Dublin), Ilanot Review, Kansas Quarterly, Literary Review, Lyric, New America, Nimrod, Primavera, Quartet, Southern Humanities Review, Texas Poetry Calendar, Wascana Review, and the Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry as well as in anthologies for Houston Poetry Fest, Poetry at Roundtop, Words& Art, and Red Sky/| poetry on the global epidemic of violence against women. Eight poems appear in New Crops from Old Fields: Eight Medievalist Poets, edited by Oz Hardwick (Stairwell Press, 2015). In 2014 she was a Juried Poet at Houston Poetry Festival and a featured poet at Inprint Houston-First Friday and has served as a poetry judge for Words&Art and Houston Poetry Fest 2016. Her poem "Homecoming" in the Texas Poetry Calendar 2016 was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has participated in poetry workshops led by Greg DePardo, Kevin Young, Marge Piercy, May Swenson, Lauren Berry, and Justine Post. She has read poetry at various universities and has organized sessions on medievalist poetry at MLA, the Medieval Academy, and the New Chaucer Society.