Janet McMillan Rives was born in Hartford, Connecticut and grew up in Storrs until moving to Tucson, Arizona midway through high school. She is a graduate of the University of Arizona (B.A.) and Duke University (M.A., Ph. D.) She taught college economics for thirty-five years and retired as Professor Emerita of Economics from the University of Northern Iowa. She resides in Oro Valley, Arizona.
Her love of poetry began during her youth in New England when she discovered the poetry of Robert Frost. She has been reading poetry her entire life and writing poetry since the 1980s. She is active in small poetry writing groups in Tucson. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, most recently The Gilded Weathervane, Still Point Arts Quarterly, The Ekphrasic Review and Soul Poetry. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks Into This Sea of Green: Poems from the Prairie, Washed by a Summer Rain: Poems from the Desert, On Horsebarn Hill: Poems, and Thread: A Memoir in Woven Poems. Her latest chapbook, co-authored with Kim McNealy Sosin, is Reflections of France: Images and Poems. Excerpts from these books appear below.
