Leah Bodine Drake (1904–1964)

Leah Bodine Drake was born in Chanute, Kansas. Her parents were oilman Thomas Hulbert Drake and his wife Cornelia Woodward Bodine. She claimed her family tree included 16th century author on magic Jean Bodin, to whom she dedicated her first collection of poems, A Hornbook for Witches (1950).

She attended Oakhurst School for Girls in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Hamilton College and Sayre College in Lexington, Kentucky. She briefly worked as a dancer in Billy Rose's Casa Mañana Revue at the Fort Worth Frontier Fiesta in 1936-1937. She was already a published poet: her first poem, "In the Shadows," appeared in the October 1935 issue of Weird Tales. Her poems and short stories were published in many other national periodicals, including the Southern Literary Messenger, The Cornhill Magazine, Nature, Commonweal, The Beloit Poetry Journal, The Poetry Chapbook, The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, and The Saturday Review. From 1941 to 1951, Drake was a music and theater critic for the Evansville (Indiana) Courier. She was a board member of the Evansville Philharmonic Orchestra, and edited its monthly newsletter, The Baton.
In 1946, her "Ballad of the Jabberwock" was published in the anthology Dark of the Moon.

Her second collection of poetry was This Tilting Dust (1956), which won the Borestone Mountain Award and was chosen for publication by the Book Club for Poetry.



She
reviewed poetry for The Atlantic Monthly from 1957 to 1958 and also was a regular contributor to the magazine. At the time of her death, she was working on her third volume of poems, Multiple Clay, which never appeared until the 2020 publication of her works, The Song of the Sun: Collected Writings.