Jane Mayhall Katz was an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 poet whose writing first received attention later in life, and was influenced by her transition from her youth in Kentucky

Kentucky

The Commonwealth of Kentucky is a state located in the East Central United States of America. As classified by the United States Census Bureau, Kentucky is a Southern state, more specifically in the East South Central region. Kentucky is one of four U.S. states constituted as a commonwealth...

 to the hustle and bustle of life in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

 and her grief over the death of her husband. Her poems and other works had been published over the years in many publications, including The New York Times

The New York Times

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

and The New Yorker

The New Yorker

The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...

.

Mayhall grew up in Louisville, Kentucky

Louisville, Kentucky

Louisville is the largest city in the U.S. state of Kentucky, and the county seat of Jefferson County. Since 2003, the city's borders have been coterminous with those of the county because of a city-county merger. The city's population at the 2010 census was 741,096...

, where she was born on May 10, 1918. She attended Black Mountain College

Black Mountain College

Black Mountain College, a school founded in 1933 in Black Mountain, North Carolina, was a new kind of college in the United States in which the study of art was seen to be central to a liberal arts education, and in which John Dewey's principles of education played a major role...

 in North Carolina

North Carolina

North Carolina is a state located in the southeastern United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west and Virginia to the north. North Carolina contains 100 counties. Its capital is Raleigh, and its largest city is Charlotte...

, where she majored in music, having entered as a talented composer, pianist and singer. There she met fellow student Leslie George Katz

Leslie George Katz

Leslie George Katz was an author and publisher who founded Eakins Press, a specialty publisher of books of art and literature.-Biography:...

. The two married in the 1940s and moved to New York City. With her husband, she was an active participant in New York's bohemian

Bohemianism

Bohemianism is the practice of an unconventional lifestyle, often in the company of like-minded people, with few permanent ties, involving musical, artistic or literary pursuits...

 community starting in the 1950s, and became friendly with many of the prominent artists at the time. Her husband founded Eakins Press

Eakins Press

Eakins Press is an American publishing house established by Leslie George Katz in 1966, naming it in honor of painter Thomas Eakins.Katz had obtained the funds to establish the company by selling a series of paintings by Eakins that his father had purchased secretly and placed in locations...

, which published art and literature, including some of Mayhall's works.

Her debut novel Cousin to Human was published by Harcourt, Brace

Harcourt Trade Publishers

Harcourt was a United States publishing firm with a long history of publishing fiction and nonfiction for children and adults. The company was based in San Diego, California, with an Editorial / Sales / Marketing / Rights offices in New York City and Orlando, Florida.In 2007, the U.S...

 in 1960, telling the story of a girl growing up in Louisville. Florence Crowther's review of the book in The New York Times

The New York Times

The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

describes how "less adept" authors would have been challenged to make the story believable, but that "Miss Mayhall is a wise author - she has Lacy keep her mouth shut and yet be understood." Her husband's Eakins Press published her 1966 book of plays, poems and stories Ready for the Ha Ha & Other Satires, and the two-volume collection of poetry Givers and Takers that was published in 1968 and 1973.

Her collection of poems Sleeping Late on Judgment Day was published by Alfred A. Knopf

Alfred A. Knopf

Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. is a New York publishing house, founded by Alfred A. Knopf, Sr. in 1915. It was acquired by Random House in 1960 and is now part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group at Random House. The publishing house is known for its borzoi trademark , which was designed by co-founder...

 in 2004 when she was 85 years old. Many of the works included in the book reflected her grief after the death of her husband, described by Andy Bruner of The New York Times as including "pain so private in its specificity that it threatens to repel the reader's empathy", while other pieces she "turns away from her sorrow and offers poems with philosophical insights into love and its inevitable loss".

Mayhall died at age 90 on March 17, 2009 in her Manhattan

Manhattan

Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...

home. She had no immediate survivors.