Deb Aronson

A Community of Poets

Janice Harrington’s “crew” comprises writers old and new

First appeared in in January 2010 under Profiles

Janice Harrington’s recent success as a poet, author and college professor is deeply rooted in her more than two decades as children’s librarian and storyteller, where her work fostered a powerful ear for vivid rhythm and imagery.

You could say Harrington’s latest incarnation as a professor in the University’s creative writing program started more than a decade ago when she invited Michael Madonick to give a poetry-writing workshop at the Champaign Public Library. When Madonick asked the children to write a poem about something important to them he urged Harrington, head of the children’s department, to participate as well.

“Then he did a very bad thing,” joked Harrington. “He looked at my poem and said it was good.”

Harrington went home, started writing and didn’t stop.

“I had a full-time job but luckily I also had insomnia,” she says. “I could sit for four hours moving words around. It felt like playing. I love how you move one word and it’s exactly RIGHT.”

The resulting poetry collection, “Even the Hollow My Body Made is Gone (2007),” won the A. Poulin, Jr., Poetry contest, designated for a first book of poetry. Most recently, Harrington was one of six writers to win the 2009 Rona Jaffe award, one of the only literary honors in the country devoted exclusively to women. Each recipient receives $25,000.

Harrington will use that award to complete Nightshift, a collection of poems about her experiences working in nursing homes, during both high school and college.

“I need to do something with all those lives, and people and faces that have stayed with me all those years,” she says.

Harrington, who grew up in rural Alabama and Nebraska, weaves her life experiences into not just her poetry but also her picture books. Her first such project, “Going North” was based on her own family’s journey and started, not surprisingly, as a poem. She showed it to her friend and colleague, Janice Del Negro,a children’s author and former director of the Center for Children’s Books at Illinois, who liked it so much she asked permission to show it to her editor. That book subsequently won, among other awards, the 2004 Ezra Jack Keats Award from the New York Public Library. Since then Harrington has published “The Chicken-Chasing Queen of Lamar County” and “Roberto Walks Home.” Her next children’s book is based on an African folktale about a procrastinating chicken.

Though Harrington was hired a mere two years ago, she is, by many accounts, an inspired and inspiring teacher.

“[Harrington] is so passionate and knows so much about her subject,” says Jeremiah Childers, a creative writing major who settled on poetry after taking a class with her. “She has a compassion and genuine interest in people in that community of poets. And as an aspiring poet you are immediately thrust into that community.”

“I’m not in the class by myself; I’ve got my crew with me,” she demurs, meaning fellow poets Williams Butler Yeats, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks, to name a few. Harrington includes her students in that crew, as well.

The students “are fascinating to me,” she says. “I admire their enthusiasm, their bravery and daring. We face the same difficulties getting what we want to say on the page. I feel as if I’m among peers.”

Meanwhile Madonick and other faculty members in the creative writing program who had been wooing Harrington for years, are ecstatic that she has joined them.

“For us, the biggest problem was that [Harrington] is ridiculously humble and self-effacing about her abilities as a writer,” he says. “We had to convince her that she not only belonged but would probably outshine most of us.”