:: Jane Cooper (1924–2007) was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and grew up in Jacksonville, Florida and Princeton, New Jersey. She came early to writing but late to publishing. In the years just following her graduation from college (and the end of World War II) she worked hard on a collection of "war" poems to be called Mercator's World but then took another direction. In 1950 she started teaching at Sarah Lawrence College, where she remained essentially until her retirement in 1987. There, she had the privilege of teaching with Muriel Rukeyser, Grace Paley, Jean Valentine, and others, and the Sarah Lawrence writing program became one of the most distinguished in the country. In 1953–54 Cooper took a year off to get an M.A. at the University of Iowa, where she studied with Robert Lowell and John Berryman.

Cooper's first book, The Weather of Six Mornings, finally appeared in 1969 and received the Lamont Award of the Academy of American Poets. Her other honors have included the Poetry Society's Shelley Award, grants from the Guggenheim and Ingram Merrill Foundations, the NEA, and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, and an Award in Literature from the Academy of American Arts and Letters. In 1995–97 she was State Poet of New York.

Of Scaffolding, her third collection, Grace Paley wrote, "This is a beautiful and stubborn book of poems. The poems say only what they mean. They have about them a great deep patience for the whole truth, a waiting in quietness for tremor and explosion." Reviewing The Flashboat: Poems Collected and Reclaimed, The New Yorker commented, "Cooper handles with equal assurance public statement and private reflection," and Mark Doty wrote, "[A] beautifully assembled life's work. Jane Cooper has been engaged in a long, patient act of making, a consideration of self-in-the-world vigorous, humble, and fierce all at once. It isn't quite accurate to say The Flashboat is full of life; instead in its way, it is a life."

:: Listen to Jane Cooper read