Jean Valentine was born in Chicago, earned her B.A. from Radcliffe College, and lived most of her life in New York City. She won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her 13th book of poetry was Shirt in Heaven, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2015. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965 - 2003 won the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry.

Jean was the State Poet of New York for two years, starting in the spring of 2008. She received the 2009 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the NEA, The Bunting Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, The New York Council for the Arts, and The New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as the Maurice English Prize, the Teasdale Poetry Prize, and The Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize in 2000. In 2014 she was given an award for exceptional accomplishment in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was awarded Yale University’s Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 2017.

She taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Graduate Writing Program of New York University, Columbia University, and the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan.

Jean Valentine died on December 29, 2020, in New York, NY. She was 86.

“According to Macari’s introduction, near the end of her life, Jean would edit her own poems, and then ask, “Did I write that?” She was never the authority of her poems. Rather, the existence of poetry was her greatest source of vitality. While we can usually assume that the voice goes out with the body, after reading Light Me Down, I can say with nervy, embodied delight, ‘I don’t know.’”
—Elizabeth Metzger, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Stunningly, each page of The New & Collected Poems of Jean Valentine is lit and alive with the poet’s violet, inner sight. In a language both crystalline and porous, hers is a poetics of attunement. Line after line of mind and earth-record shaped into breath, taught by the snow, the dead, the grasses, the dreaming. Toward all that is more-than-language, she seems to unlatch the gate inside each word so that such energy might again belong to a ceaseless becoming. Radiance or starlight of breath or all. I know I am not alone when I say Jean Valentine is a genius of my heart. With Quietness, expressivity, and devotion, her work burns shoulder to shoulder with the candles. I press this text to my chest knowing it is a sacred trace of one of our most exquisite practitioners. Gone into the mysteries, and yet not gone—"
—Aracelis Girmay

“In her lucid, haunting style, Jean Valentine chronicles life's delicate break ups. Her Collected Poems is a testament of intense devotion to fill the mundanity of loss with a secret light. Poetry nourishes her, at times poetry eats her: she sees through poetry, thinks through poetry; from the snows of her, poetry digs itself out from the depth of her. You are holding a treasure chest of elegies, lullabies, prayers, letters, and dreams, spoken to lovers, parents, children, and poets, from rooms full of snow, from doorways, and deathbeds. Respectfully, intimately, and desperately, year after year, Jean Valentine is turning everything that is not language into language. “Ah Jeanie,” a dead father says to the poet, “you’re still in words.” Light Me Down: The New & Collected Poems of Jean Valentine is a life-long letter, written with the blood of language, affirming her father’s claim. Jean Valentine is forever in words.”
—Valzhyna Mort, author of Music for the Dead and Resurrected

"Among the functions of poetry, one of the most important is its capacity to be with and hold and regard and tend to the mysteries. And I know of no one who more beautifully or rigorously tended those mysteries in her poems than Jean Valentine. She was like a gardener of those mysteries, and her remarkable body of work a garden of them."
—Ross Gay