Minty, Judith
Marcy 28, 1909 - May 9, 1981
Place of Birth: Detroit, MI
Place of Principal Residence: New Era, MI
Biography:
Judith Minty was born in Detroit, Michigan to Karl and Margaret Makinen. During childhood her years were divided into spending the school semesters in Detroit and the summers camping with her family in the North Woods. She graduated with a Master’s in English from Western Michigan University in 1993, and has worked as a Professor at colleges in Michigan, the West Coast, and California. In 1982 to 1993 she served as the director of the Creative Writing Program at Humboldt State University. While teaching, Minty kept up her writing, publishing poems, essays, and short stories that have enjoyed much success and have been published in over fifty anthologies. She is married to Edgar S. Minty and has three children, Lora, John Reed, and Ann. Currently Minty resides in western Michigan by the Lake Michigan shoreline, but spends part of her year at a cabin on the Yellow Dog River in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
Selected Works:
- Lake Songs and Other Fears (1974)
- Yellow Dog Journal (1979)
- In the Presence of Mothers (1981)
- Contemporary Michigan Poetry: Poems from the Third Coast (1988)
- Dancing the Fault (1991)
- The Mad Painter Poems (1996)
- Walking with the Bear: Selected and New Poems (2000)
Awards:
- 1974 Eunice Tietjens Award, Poetry Magazine
- 1974 United States Award of the International Poetry Forum
- 1981, 1983 Grants, Michigan Council for the Arts
- 1985 PEN Syndicated Fiction Award
- California Fiction Award from PEN/The Mead Foundation
- Villa Montalvo Award for Excellence in Poetry
- Kentucky Foundation for Women Residency Grant
- Honorary Doctorate of Humanities from Michigan Technological University
- Mark Twain Award for Distinguished Contributions to Midwestern Literature from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature
Critical Reception:
In 1974 Minty’s first book Lake Songs and Other Fears won the US Award of the International Poetry Forum. Her poetry has been praised for its vivid imagery and captivating themes that Minty draws from her own life experiences. Editor Elinor Benedict of Passages North wrote Minty “achieves her power without resorting to excess of diction, metaphor, rhetoric, or quirky play with punctuation. In the web of human relations, she avoids sentimentality; in the depths of the unconscious, she resists portentousness.” Minty’s poems are used in school curriculums and have been said to reflect Michigan in her poetry including nature and animal themes.
Relevance of Place to Author’s Work:
Minty is greatly inspired by her surroundings. Her book, The Yellow Dog Journal, reflects her experience of living in the lake country of Michigan near the Yellow Dog River. In Dancing the Fault Minty compares the lake country of Michigan with the rainy coast of California (where she lived for several years). Critics have recognized the constant thread of place in Minty’s work, whether in Michigan or in California.