Biography

Jeanne Minahan is a poet, writer, teacher, and scholar. 

She collaborates frequently with composers and musicians and her work has been published in Potomac Review, Cimarron Review, Women's Review of Books, and other journals. Grammy award and Pulitzer-prize winning composer Jennifer Higdon set six of Minahan's poems for violin, orchestra and chorus. The Singing Rooms was co-commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and the Minnesota Symphony Orchestra, and was recorded on the Telarc label with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Robert Spano with Jennifer Koh on violin. It has been performed In Philadelphia, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Knoxville, Memphis, Carnegie Hall and at L'église de la Madeleine, Paris. Higdon also set a series of poems in Telegram, a commission by the Yale Glee Club. Minahan's collaborations with composer Michael Djupstrom include a commission from the Lake George Music Festival, which was performed by the Brooklyn Art Song Society. Djupstrom set an additional three poems for a commission by Lyric Fest. That piece, Oars in Water, premiered in Philadelphia with the artists of Lyric Fest. Composer Ya-Jhu Yang set six poems in Rain Out at Sea and, in 2018, premiered Five Minahan Songs in Philadelphia.

A former reporter, poetry editor, and freelance writer, Minahan was selected to participate in a poetry masterclass at Tŷ Newydd, Wales, with Carol Ann Duffy, poet laureate of England, and Gillian Clarke, the national poet of Wales.

Minahan earned her B.A. from Bucknell University and studied as a Rotary International Graduate Fellow at the University College Cork, National University of Ireland, where she earned an M.A. with Firsts in Anglo-Irish Literature. She completed her Ph.D. at Bryn Mawr College. Jeanne Minahan (the pen name of Jeanne M. McGinn) teaches creative writing and literature at the Curtis Institute of Music, where she holds the Ruth and Morris Williams Chair in the Liberal Arts.