Background
Mary Virginia Hamilton was born in the Bronx and raised in Montclair, New Jersey. She attended Montclair Kimberley Academy, graduating in the class of 1929. She disliked the name "Mary" and dropped it as a young adult. Adair composed her first poem at the age of two; since then, she has written over a thousand poems. Exposed to poetry as a young child through her father, she began writing her own poems regularly at age 6. More than seventy have been published in journals and major magazines, such as the Atlantic and the New Yorker.
She received her B.A. in English from Mount Holyoke College in 1933 and her M.A. from Radcliffe College. Hamilton was professor emerita at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona in Pomona, California where she taught from 1957 to 1980.
Read more about this topic: Virginia Hamilton Adair
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