About Linda Dyer

Linda Dyer grew up outside Detroit and graduated from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor with a B.A. in English and a minor in Art History.  She began her career as a children’s librarian at the Dearborn Public Library. Her reviews of children’s records appeared in School Library Journal at that time, but writing remained a largely private activity until she moved to upstate New York, western Connecticut and finally to Amherst, New Hampshire.  

Her work, both prose and poetry, has appeared in newspapers, including the New York Times, Hartford Courant and Christian Science Monitor; literary journals such as Slant, Poet Lore, Birmingham Poetry Review, Soundings East, Entelechy International, Front Range Review, Rockhurst Review and Fourth River and anthologies, including Poet Showcase: An Anthology of New Hampshire Poets, Heartbeat of New England, Tale Feathers and The Blueline Anthology.  Her work has also appeared online in journals such as Brevity and Poet’s Canvas, which awarded her essay “Home” first prize for creative non-fiction.  

Other writing-related projects have included collaboration with other New Hampshire poets and artists from the Women’s Caucus for Art, culminating in an exhibit of visual art and poetry.  She has also incorporated editing into her writing life, first as an editor of Ad Hoc Monadnock: A Literary Anthology and as a poetry editor for Amoskeag: The Journal of Southern New Hampshire University.  

In New Hampshire, Linda Dyer became captivated by Willa Cather who is buried in Jaffrey, the place she most loved to write and where she produced her best work.  Curiosity as to how this small New Hampshire town connected to both her passion for the West and her creative process resulted in an essay in an anthology Where the Mountain Stands Alone, about Cather’s accidental discovery of Jaffrey in 1917, and an article about cookery and Willa Cather in the academic journal Teaching Cather, and a biography, currently in manuscript, with the working title Portrait of a Writer at Work: Willa Cather in Jaffrey.