ABOUT

"They call back to us

from the gauzy edge of paradise,

good news, good news."

Anne Sexton

IN A NUTSHELL

A 1970 gift of Sexton's All My Pretty Ones taught her: sometimes hope and despair are the same thing, and how painfully beautiful language can be.

Ms. Summer's formal education began with two marvelous years at Elmwood Nursery School. After that it was all downhill

Pulled by her ear from Home Ec class for making fun of the diapering doll

Dismissed from 9th grade English class for "inappropriate" (hippie) attire

Work anthologized twice before graduating college

Repeatedly (wrongly) accused of shoplifting

The moon, snowfall and geese in flight she finds marvelous still

Believes inanimate objects have emotional lives

Owns valid motorcycle licence

Took a year of college Welsh. Says her Spanish is gringo-passable because her mother, a painter and former dancer, was born in Guadalajara

First home: London Terrace, Chelsea, NYC

Lives in the house in which she was raised

Cancer sun, cancer moon, scorpio rising

Awarded Best Camper, Camp Senasqua, Croton, NY, 1963 & 1964

Studied with Elena Georgiou, Jan Clausen, Kenny Fries, Edward Field and Naomi Lazard; seminal high school English teacher, Ellen Ishkanian

Ms. Summer received a B.A. from Kirkland College (later absorbed by Hamilton College) in Clinton, NY. During her matriculation she traveled abroad to study contemporary Danish poetry (above, in Hillerød, 1975). In 2013 she won her MFA from Goddard College in Plainfield, VT.

SOME BACKSTORY

Jane Summer is her mother's firstborn in a fractured, multitudinous New York family. Her elder foster brother was the first Black student to graduate from the local high school. Neighbors were less than welcoming. The family had long been active in the civil rights movement, and Jane learned to walk on the picket line. As a sophomore in high school she sued her school's board of education after being suspended for circulating fliers in support of the Chicago 8. Harassment of the family and hate mail ensued. The contentious atmosphere contributed to Ms. Summer's deep and abiding sense of ill ease and alienation, which pervade her work.

Ms. Summer was brought up to follow in her mother's footprints, which meant she was destined not to write but to dance. As a young girl, thanks to her mother's passion, Ms. Summer studied with some of the greatest dancers and dance educators of the time: Jane Dudley, Donald McKayle, Esther Nelson, Liane Plane. "My whole life I've been told my feet are my best feature. I'm afraid it's true." But dance was not to be her medium.

"At some unarticulated level, I knew from a very young age I'd had it with being onstage, that 'performing' might swallow me whole. I was afflicted and the stage was not for me."

Credit: Roxanne Cirelli