Ten Female Faith Poets-A Curated List

Making Friends with Poetry? Start Here.

Jun 21, 2024

If you are looking for where to begin reading more poetry, this list of female faith poets is a great starting point.1 Also, you are smart and know well the ways of Google; I have linked to some of the author sites but not all their books—I’ll leave you to conduct your own search. But there are bookstack photos to guide you!

(l to r) Author Cornelia Seigneur, Luci Shaw, Jody Collins, Vina Mogg. Festival of Faith & Writing, Calvin College, 2018

1. Luci Shaw

The matriarch of Christian poetry (in my humble opinion) is Luci Shaw.I first began reading Luci’s work in 1973 and it was her poems that offered me the spark to begin writing poetry myself. Luci is alive and well here in the Pacific NW and just celebrated her 92nd birthday! I still have a copy of her first book of poetry, Listen to the Green—signed when I met her at the Festival of Faith & Writing in 2018—and it’s a treasure. Her encouragement to me as we sat and chatted was a tremendous boost to my venturing into writing poetry of my own. If you don’t know where to begin reading, I’d suggest her newer work, ‘Eye of the Beholder.’ The older titles are hard to come by but used book sites might have them. The link to Luci’s website is HERE with her poetry and books.

Abigail Carroll is the author of three poetry collections: Cup My Days Like Water reflections on the first 75 Psalms, Habitation of Wonder (Wipf & Stock, 2018), an offering of poems that travels the intersection of the natural landscape and the landscape of spirit and A Gathering of Larks: Letters to Saint Francis from a Modern-Day Pilgrim (Eerdmans, 2017), called “sparked with joy and stitched with whimsy” by the Chicago Tribune. Abigail makes her home in Vermont, where she serves as pastor of arts and spiritual formation at Church at the Well, and where she enjoys walking, photographing nature, and playing harp. Click here for her website.

Barbara Crooker and I first met at the Seattle AWP Conference in 2014. Being a poet ‘of a certain age,’ she has always inspired me, particularly with her encouragement in learning to write poetry by “reading the school of 3,000 books.” You can read more about Barbara and her work on her website.
Jeanne Murray Walker is a writer and teacher born in Parkers Prairie, a village of a thousand people in Minnesota. She frequently lectures, gives readings, and teaches workshops in places ranging from The Library of Congress and Oxford University to Whidbey Island, WA, from a working fish camp in Alaska and Texas canyon country to Orvieto, Italy. She taught at The University of Delaware for 40 years, where she headed the Creative Writing Concentration.. She also serves as a Mentor in the Seattle Pacific University Master of Fine Arts Program. Click here for Jeanne’s website.
Laurie Klein is the author of The House of 49 Doors, a memoir told in verse, and Where the Sky Opens. She also wrote the classic praise chorus “I Love You, Lord” forty-three years ago, “weary and bone-lonely…while our first child slept.” Her poems and prose have appeared in many publications, including Ascent, The Southern Review, Ruminate, Atlanta Review, Terrain, and the Holman Personal Worship Bible. She is a recipient of the Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred. She lives with her husband near their daughters and a growing group of grandchildren in Eastern Washington. You can connect with her at www.lauriekleinscribe.com.

These bookstack photos offer a visual for poetry choices—too many to name!

Marjorie Maddox is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania. She has published eleven collections of poetry, most recently the re-released Transplant, Transport, Transubstantiation, about her father’s heart transplant. Some of her other titles include What She Was Saying (stories) from Fomite Press, Wives’ Tales (poems) from Seven Kitchens Press, and True, False, None of the Above from Cascade Books’ Poeima Poetry Series, as well as Local News from Someplace Else (about living in an unsafe world). Marjorie lives with her husband and two children in Williamsport, Pa., birthplace of Little League and home of the Little League World Series. Click here for Marjorie’s website.

7. Susan Cowger Author of her newest collection tracing the arc of her cancer journey, ‘Hawk & Songbird’ and ‘Slender Warble.’ Susan is co-founder with Laurie Klein of Rock and Sling Press and Journal in 2004, a well-received publication in the world of faith writing. Rock and Sling’s operations were passed to Whitworth University in Spokane WA in 2010. Susan offers her creative expressions in the paths of writing, sculpting and painting and well as poetry.

My interview with Susan can be found HERE.

Laura Reece Hogan Author of: Three poetry collections, Butterfly Nebula, Litany of Flights and O Garden Dweller.

A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Laura serves on the poetry advisory board of Wildhouse Press and is the Assistant Poetry Editor of Solum Press. She was a 2023 Oxbelly Writers’ Retreat Fellow. Her essays have been featured in Spirituality and Ekstasis Magazine.
Laura earned a B.A. from Rice University in Houston, Texas, a J.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, and an M.A. in theology from St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, California. She lives in Southern California. ——from Laura’s website.

My essay interview with Laura is here on Dappled Things

Tania Runyan (books pictured above)
Tania Runyan, MA/MFA, lives in Illinois, speaking at writing workshops and writing poetry, much of which grapples with scripture. She is the author of five poetry collections—What Will Soon Take Place, Second Sky, A Thousand Vessels, Simple Weight, and Delicious Air—and the popular instructional guides How to Read a Poem and How to Write a Poem. Her most recent book is Making Peace with Paradise: An Autobiography of a California Girl, about her West Coast upbringing.
My blog interview from 2014 with Tania is HERE.

Early American and Twentieth Century Poets

Anne Ridler
Anne Porter, Catholic poet
Anne Bradstreet, 1612-1672
Madeleine L’Engle (not just a fiction writer!)
Sara Teasdale
Christina Rossetti
and the ever mysterious
Emily Dickinson
Phillis Wheatley, Slave Poet

It should be noted that the Contemporary poets listed above write in free verse, while the early American ish era and Classical poetesses write primarily in rhyme and meter.