janet winans
Janet Winans (1933-2022) grew up in San Francisco and is a graduate of Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio, and the MFA Program for writers at Warren Wilson College, Swannanoa, North Carolina. She was married to Woodie Winans and had three children, Jennifer, Stephan and Jessica. Winans was the author of three chapbooks, Our Abidance, If Summer Freezes, and Of Dreams and Bones. She taught at Central Arizona College, Arizona Western College, and as an Artist-in-Residence with the Arizona Commission on the Arts and Young Audiences of Santa Cruz County.
“Janet Winans’ careful, respectful observations are sacraments of emotional clarity. Her poems seem inevitable, as if they have always existed, and in that spirit, move us out of ourselves toward larger meaning.”
“She is at work being alive in the world, moving through it as we all are but with the gift, the earnest gift, of seeing into things.””
Staircase of Roots
poems by janet winans
In her first full-length collection, Janet Winans brings an astute eye to two lives: urban beginnings in San Francisco and her present life in an Arizona hamlet, amidst thin populations, scattered tribes, and lost towns. What holds the two worlds in common is her way of finding habitats “between the cracks, / beyond the lines.” In both worlds, her chutzpah is a joy, whether as a child dashing down a beach in the knowledge that “No one was ever swifter nor / surer, no one more resolute”—or as a woman riding toward home down a familiar horse trail “over a staircase of roots,” she and the horse sometimes stopping to “lick drinks from shale / slick and gray as clay.”
