The Morning After Burns Night

Joyce Wilson is editor of The Poetry Porch, a literary magazine on the internet since 1997. Her poems appear in many journals, among them The Hudson Review, The Lyric, and Think. Her collections include The Etymology of Spruce (2010), The Springhouse (2010), The Need for a Bridge (2019), and Take and Receive (Kelsay Books, 2019). Her profiles of poets Eavan Boland, Julia Budenz, Etel Adnan, and Diana Der Hovanessian are on the Women Poets Timeline Project at Mezzo Cammin.

Taking classes as a special student at Harvard University for nearly a decade in the 1980s, Wilson received a B.A. through Harvard Extension and a M.Ed. from the Graduate School of Education. During that time, she studied writing poetry with Seamus Heaney and writing about poetry with Helen Vendler, in between seminars in English and American literature and education. She worked at Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room as Assistant to the Curator and Managing Editor of Harvard Review (1991–1996) and taught English at Boston University (1987–1991, 1998–2002) and Suffolk University (2003–2013).

Wilson and her husband have lived in the same house in Scituate, M.A., on the South Shore of Boston, since 1975. On their acre of land, they grow vegetables and flowers and raise flocks of chickens, who contribute their eggs and fertilizer to the ongoing process of growing things. They have traveled to Europe, the Middle East, and now Switzerland, to catch up with their daughter, married with two daughters, who is getting a doctorate in Art Criticism from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She specializes in the art of the Middle East, the locale of her great-grandparents.

Paperback: 72 pages
Publisher: Kelsay Books (June 3, 2026)