Nancy Byrd Turner Biography
Nancy Byrd Turner (July 29, 1880 - September 5, 1971) was an American poet, editor and lecturer.
Nancy Byrd Turner, born in Boydton, Virginia, was the eldest child of Rev. Byrd Thornton and Nancy Turner.
In 1898 she graduated from Hannah More Academy in Maryland and began work as a teacher. During this period her work appeared in several national magazines including the Saturday Evening Post and Scribner's.
In 1917, she moved to Boston to join the editorial staff of The Youth's Companion. By 1922 she was an editor for The Atlantic, The Independent, and Houghton Mifflin. She joined the MacDowell art colony in 1925 and remained there until 1944.
Her first book of poetry, A Riband on My Rein, was published in 1929. Over the course of her career she published 15 books, ranging from adult poetry to children's literature and lyrics. Her work appeared in England and in the United States in such magazines as Good Housekeeping, Harper's Magazine, Ladies' Home Journal, and the New Yorker.
She retired to Ashland, Virginia to become a lecturer and freelance writer.
Everything is black and gold,
Black and gold, to-night:
Yellow pumpkins, yellow moon
Yellow candlelight;
...
He played by the river when he was young.
He raced with rabbits along the hills,
He fished for minnows, and climbed and swung,
...
Sometimes the weather is a man
With gray cloak flying free;
His coat of mail is icy hail,
A stormy steed rides he.
...
Only the human dead may lie
In God's good acre wide and fair;
Those of an humbler kind who die
...
Death is only an old door
Set in a garden wall
On gentle hinges it gives, at dusk
When the thrushes call
...
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