Jarold Ramsey

Jarold Ramsey grew up on a ranch north of Madras, Oregon, and earned a BA in English from the University of Oregon, and a PhD in English Literature from the University of Washington. For nearly thirty years he taught Shakespeare, Modern Poetry, Creative Writing, and Native American Literature at the University of Rochester in New York State. He and his wife Dorothy, also a teacher, have three children and five grandchildren. After retirement, in 2000 Jerry and Dorothy moved back to the family...See more

Jarold Ramsey grew up on a ranch north of Madras, Oregon, and earned a BA in English from the University of Oregon, and a PhD in English Literature from the University of Washington. For nearly thirty years he taught Shakespeare, Modern Poetry, Creative Writing, and Native American Literature at the University of Rochester in New York State. He and his wife Dorothy, also a teacher, have three children and five grandchildren. After retirement, in 2000 Jerry and Dorothy moved back to the family ranch in Central Oregon, where they assumed the roles of "Groundskeepers Emeriti."Ramsey's books of poems include Love in an Earthquake(1973), Hand-Shadows (1989), and Thinking Like a Canyon: New and Selected Poems (2012). His collection of Northwest Indian traditional stories, Coyote Was Going There (1977) is still in print. Since moving back to Central Oregon, he has written two books on the region's local history, New Era (2003) and Words Marked by a Place (2016), and he serves as Advisory Editor of the local history journal, THE AGATE. His poetry has won numerous awards, including the Lillian Fairchild Award and the Quarterly Review International Poetry Prize; and in 2017 he was given the C.E.S. Wood Award for Lifetime Achievement as an Oregon Writer. See less