At age eighty, I am publishing my first volume of poems.
Monica McAlpine was the first in her family to go to college. She took her BA from Nazareth College and her PhD in English from the University of Rochester. Over a thirty-six-year career at University of Massachusetts Boston, she taught many first-generation students like herself. Specializing in medieval literature, she published two books on Chaucer (with Cornell University Press and University of Toronto Press), and several articles. Her study of Chaucer’s Pardoner, in PMLA, 1980, has been reprinted several times. Winter Bride (Main Street Rag Press, 2021) is her first volume of poems. Other poems of hers have appeared in Ibbetson Street, Leon, Poetry Quarterly, The Aurorean, and Wilderness House Literary Review.