Understanding Creativity

JANE PIIRTO is Trustees' Professor in the School of Education at Ashland University in Ashland, Ohio, where she is the Director of Talent Development Education. She is a native of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and has her undergraduate degree in English from Northern Michigan University. She has an M.A. in English from Kent State University, an M.Ed. in counseling from South Dakota State University, and a Ph.D. in school leadership from Bowling Green State University. She has been a high school teacher, a counselor, a college instructor of humanities, a coordinator of programs for the talented, Principal of the Hunter College Elementary School, and an artist in the schools in Michigan, South Dakota, Ohio, and New York City. She has served as a consultant and speaker in Europe, the Near East, Southern Asia, South America, and throughout the United States. She has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Georgia. Her Understanding Those Who Create has been translated into Chinese. She has published over a hundred poems, short stories, and articles, and thirteen books and chapbooks, among them Talented Children and Adults (2 editions), Understanding Those Who Create (2 editions), "My Teeming Brain" Understanding Creative Writers, Luovuus, A Location in the Upper Peninsula (collected poems, stories, and essays), The Three-Week Trance Diet (novel), mamamama, Postcards from the Upper Peninsula, Between the Memory and the Experience, Silent Midnight Snow Comes Down, Journeys to Sacred Places (poetry chapbooks). She has received two Individual Artist Fellowships-one in fiction and one in poetry-from the Ohio Arts Council, and a grant from the Fulbright-Hays Foundation. She has two grown children and a granddaughter.