The Aha! Moment
WHEN Jean Connor submitted “Of Some Renown,” along with four other poems, to the Passager Poetry Contest in 2001, she was eighty years old and living in retirement in northern Vermont following a long career as director of development for the New York State library system. She had published only three previous poems. At the time of Connor’s submission, Kendra Kopelke and Mary Azrael had already been, the Baltimore-based journal dedicated to publishing the work of writers over the age of fifty, for ten years. Connor’s poems—“Of Some Renown,” in particular—changed everything.
