Jane Beal

Jane Beal, PhD is a writer. She has created more than twenty-five poetry collections, including _Sanctuary_ (Finishing Line Press, 2008) and _Rising: Poems for America_ (Wipf and Stock, 2015), as well as three recording projects combining music and poetry: “Songs from the Secret Life,” “Love-Song,” and “The Jazz Bird.” She writes fiction and creative non-fiction, including biographies of early English women writers and midwives in the medieval and early modern eras.

In the field of literary scholarship, she is the author of _The Signifying Power of Pearl: Medieval Literary and Cultural Contexts for the Transformation of Genre_ (Routledge, 2017) and _John Trevisa and the English Polychronicon_ (ACMRS/Brepols, 2012), editor of _Illuminating Moses: A History of Reception from Exodus to the Renaissance_ (Brill, 2014) and _Illuminating Jesus in the Middle Ages_ (Brill, 2019), and co-editor of _Translating the Past: Essays on Medieval Literature in Honor of Marijane Osborn_ (ACMRS, 2012) and _Approaches to Teaching the Middle English Pearl_ (Modern Language Association, 2017). Her book, _Pearl: A Middle English Edition and Modern English Translation_, is forthcoming from Broadview in 2020. She also writes on the mythology of J.R.R. Tolkien.

She has served as a midwife in the U.S., Uganda, and the Philippines, experiences she has written about in her poetry collections _Epiphany: Birth Poems_ and _Transfiguration: A Midwife’s Birth Poems_, and she has taught at Wheaton College, Colorado Christian University, and the University of California, Davis. She currently teaches at the University of La Verne in southern California. To learn more, visit janebeal.wordpress.com.