John Delaney

John Delaney retired after 35 years in the Dept. of Rare Books and Special Collections of Princeton University Library, where he was head of manuscripts processing and then, for the last 15 years, curator of historic maps. He’s written a number of works on cartography, including Strait Through: Magellan to Cook and the Pacific; First X, Then Y, Now Z: An Introduction to Landmark Thematic Maps; and Nova Caesarea: A Cartographic Record of the Garden State, 1666-1888. These have extensive website versions. He’s been writing poems for most of his life, and, in the 1970s, attended the Writing Program of Syracuse University, where his mentors were poets W. D. Snodgrass and  Philip Booth. In subtle ways, they have bookended his approach to poems. In 2017, John published Waypoints, a collection of place poems. Twenty Questions, a chapbook, appeared in 2019, and Delicate Arch: Poems and Photographs of National Parks and Monuments was published in 2022. A trip to the Galápagos archipelago with his son Andrew in 2021 resulted in the chapbook Galápagos (2023), consisting of his son’s color photographs and John’s poetic responses; and Nile, a similarly-styled chapbook of his poems and photographs, came out in early 2024.. John has traveled widely, preferring remote, natural settings, and makes his home in Port Townsend, WA.