Poet - Novelist - Academic
Judith Stanton grew up on a farm in Piedmont North Carolina, riding horses, herding cows, working in tobacco, and listening to her father’s stories of mules and plows and teams that pulled the wagon to town. Secretly she read every novel and poem she could get her hands on and dreamed of writing her own.
That dream came true. Her contemporary equestrian suspense, A Stallion to Die For, has a five-star rating on Amazon.com.
Her scholarly edition of The Collected Letters of Charlotte Smith is published by Indiana University Press.
Her recent poetry collection, The Deer Diaries, records images and experiences of her life in rural Chatham County, North Carolina, and has received high critical praise.
Learn more about Judith Stanton
Poetry
As a girl, Judith loved poetry so much that she would sit on the floor, back against her bed, and read her favorite poets out loud—anything by Emily Dickenson and Robert Frost, and one special favorite poem by Walt Whitman, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” Growing up, Judith became a closet poet, writing when the spirit moved her but rarely sharing her secret efforts with anyone. To her own amazement now, they’re pretty darn good.
Judith’s poetry focuses on the intersection of our human world with nature—and to connect with people who don’t usually read poetry. With her poems, she hopes that they can relate to the natural world she embraces.
More about Judith’s poetry
Fiction
A voracious reader as a child, Judith’s elementary school teachers gave her free run of the library. She took home a new book almost every day and often finished it that night. Except for the dinosaur books and books about America’s national parks—honest!—they were all novels. She loved novels so much that she got a Ph.D. with a specialty in History of the Novel, never dreaming that 25 years later, she would become a novelist.
After seven novels—five published and two almost completed—it means the world to her to meet someone who has read one of her novels and enjoyed her characters’ journeys—conflicts, losses, and of course, finally triumphs. Judith loves happy endings.
More about Judith’s fiction
Scholarship
Before, during and after Judith’s love of writing poems and novels, she encountered the works of the amazing late 18th-century novelist and poet Charlotte Smith. Judith wrote her dissertation on prose style in Smith’s novels, and then at dissertation orals, one of her professors asked her: “What next?”
“Well,” Judith temporized, “we need a modern biography. But to write that, someone needs to collect Smith’s letters.”
That project took Judith another 25 years, and a dozen research trips to England (alas, poor Judith—but what fun!). Her work resulted in an 800-page edition of 500 Smith letters.