Craft: Virginia Hamilton Adair

Though she spent a lifetime practicing her craft (she started writing poems when she was 6), Virginia Hamilton Adair (1913-2004) did not publish her first book until 1996 when she was 83.

Adair: “God is a girl, they intoned, and if you don't believe us, no soup tonight.”

Adair was an English professor at California Polytechnic at Pomona from 1957-1980. All her life she decided against publishing because, as she said to People magazine:

I got tremendously interested in teaching and scholarship and getting married and then the three children. Publishing takes a sort of canniness that I didn’t really think went with poetry. I was afraid of writing to please somebody else instead of myself.

Adair’s friend, the poet and professor Robert Mezey, helped her select and publish this first book, Ants on the Melon: A Collection of Poems. Adair’s style feels non-contemporary (and at times even straight-up old-fashioned), but she has surprising dark humor and insight into her subjects.