About Helen Frost
Helen Frost was born in Brookings, South Dakota,the fifth of ten children. She graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in Elementary Education and a concentration in English, with Philip Booth and W. D. Snodgrass among her teachers. She received her Masters degree in English from Indiana University in 1994. She is the recipient of a 2009 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship.
Throughout her career, writing and teaching have been inter-woven threads. She has published poetry, children's books, anthologies, and a play, as well as a book about teaching writing. She has taught writing at all levels, from pre-school through university.
She has lived in Massachusetts, Scotland, Vermont, Alaska, Oregon, and California, and presently lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana. In Scotland, she taught at Kilquhanity House School, a progressive boarding school. In Alaska, she taught for three years in a one-teacher school in Telida, an Athabascan community of about 25 people, and later taught fifth grade in Ketchikan.
Her first collection of poetry, Skin of a Fish, Bones of a Bird, won the Women Poets Series Competition in 1993 and was published by Ampersand Press. Poems in that collection were also awarded the Robert H. Winner Memorial Award and the Mary Carolyn Davies Memorial Award by the Poetry Society of America. Her second collection, as if a dry wind, was published by Pecan Grove Press in 2009.
In 1998, Helen worked with the Fort Wayne YWCA and the Fort Wayne Youtheatre to help high school students write about how they had been affected by violence. Their writing was the basis of a play and an anthology of student writing, both entitled Why Darkness Seems So Light. That work led to the book, When I Whisper, Nobody Listens: Helping Young People Write About Difficult Issues (Heinemann, 2001).
Keesha's House, published in 2003 by Frances Foster Books / Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, was awarded a Michael L. Printz Honor in 2004. Frances Foster subsequently published Spinning Through the Universe in 2004, The Braid in 2006 and Diamond Willow in 2008, and Crossing Stones in 2009. These five books are all novels-in-poems for children and young adults. Monarch and Milkweed, published in 2008 by Atheneum, is a picture book.
Helen worked with the Fort Wayne Dance Collective for over 10 years as part of an inter-disciplinary artistic team in a violence-prevention program incorporating creative movement, percussion, visual arts, and writing.
Helen lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana. She is married and has two sons and two grandchildren. She enjoys hiking, beaded gourd-work, kayaking, and raising and releasing monarch butterflies.
A detailed autobiography of Helen Frost, with photographs, can be found in "Something About the Author," Volume 194, found in the reference section of many libraries, most often in the children's section.