Jane McKinley is a Baroque oboist with degrees in music from Northwestern University and Princeton University. She is the author of Vanitas, winner of the 2011 Walt McDonald First-Book Award (Texas Tech University Press). Her life as a poet began in 2003 when, haunted by an image, she began writing after a lapse of thirty years. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Five Points, The Southern Review, on Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. In 2023 she was awarded a Poetry Fellowship by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Her manuscript Mudman was a finalist for the Able Muse Book Award, judged by David Yezzi, and is forthcoming from Able Muse Press. She lives in Hopewell, New Jersey.