Dinah Hawken (born 1943) is a New Zealand poet, creative writing teacher, physiotherapist, counsellor and social worker.
She worked at Victoria University of Wellington as a student counsellor for two decades,[1][2] and has taught creative writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters.
It was largely written while she was living in New York City, where she worked as a social worker while studying for a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Brooklyn College with John Ashbery.
[2] Harry Ricketts, writing for the Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, considers that she is also influenced by Wallace Stevens and Adrienne Rich.
[2] Her next collection, Small Stories of Devotion (1991, published in the United Kingdom in 1995) and established Hawken's reputation as one of several successful women poets who emerged in the 1980s.