Jane Creighton

Jane Creighton is Professor of English at the University of Houston—Downtown, where she teaches literature and creative writing. A recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, she taught American literature for a year at Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. In the decades prior to her university teaching, her social activism included holding organizing positions with the National Lawyers Guild and the Center for Constitutional Rights. In the 1970s, she edited and published an independent poetry magazine, Sailing the Road Clear, and in subsequent years taught creative writing in public schools for the Texas Commission on the Arts, Teachers & Writers Collaborative, and Writers in the Schools. In 1987, she served as literary curator for the Washington Project on the Arts exhibition, War and Memory in the Aftermath of Vietnam. Her publications include Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, the Poetry Foundation website, and the anthologies Enchantment of the Ordinary, We Begin Here: Poems for Palestine and Lebanon, Unwinding the Vietnam War, Close to the Bone: Memoirs of Hurt, Rage, and Desire, Encountering Disgrace: Reading and Teaching Coetzee’s Novel, The Edinburgh Companion to British and American War Literature, and Still Seeking an Attitude: Critical Reflections on the Work of June Jordan. She is the author of two collections of poems, Ceres in an Open Field (1980) and Bone Skid, Bone Beauty (2022) . Originally from the northeast, she has lived in Houston since 1988.