Jane McKinley is a Baroque oboist who founded the Dryden Ensemble and served as its artistic director for nearly thirty years. She holds a Bachelor of Music degree from Northwestern University and an MFA in historical musicology from Princeton University. In 2003 she began writing poetry after a lapse of thirty years and in 2008 was awarded the Patricia Dobler Prize for her sonnet, “Mud Season.” Her poetry collection Vanitas received the 2011 Walt McDonald First-Book Prize and was published by Texas Tech University Press. Her poems have appeared in the Georgia Review, the Southern Review, Five Points, Baltimore Review, Great River Review, Tar River Poetry, 2River View, ONE ART, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. Her honors include a 2023 Poetry Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and a 2025 Fellowship at the Virginia Center of Creative Arts. She lives with her husband in Hopewell, New Jersey.