Jane Beal (Ph.D., University of California, Davis) is Professor of English Literature and past Chair of the English Department at the University of La Verne. Her poetry collections include _Sanctuary_ (2008), _Rising_ (2015), and _Song of the Selkie_ (2020) as well as seven haiku micro-chaps, Journey, Garden, Bliss, Wide Awake and Dreaming, In the Santa Cruz Mountains, Songs of Water, and Wilderness. She has created three audio recording projects combining poetry and music, “Songs from the Secret Life,” “Love-Song,” and “The Jazz Bird.” Her fiction is published in Crux Literary Journal, Dappled Things, Literature Today, Pacific Review, The Voices Project, two anthologies, _Law & Disorder_ and _Draw Down the Moon_, and her books, _Hourglass_ (under review) and _Eight Stories from Undiscovered Countries_ (2009). Her creative nonfiction includes biographies of women writers, in Gale’s British Writers and American Writers series, and articles on the history and practice of midwifery in Midwifery Today. Her lyric essays appear in Cantos, Fireflies’ Light, Impermanent Earth, Liturgy for the World, The Nightingale, The Remembered Arts Journal, The Right Words, Snapdragon, and the essay anthology, _Laments_. Her academic publications, including eight books and forty peer-reviewed journal articles and chapters, focus primarily on a medieval history of the world, the _Polychronicon_; an exquisitely beautiful, fourteenth-century, dream vision poem, "Pearl"; and the mythology of J.R.R. Tolkien. To learn more about her work, please visit https://janebeal.wordpress.com.