M. Travis Lane

Millicent Travis Lane (known as M. Travis Lane; born 23 September 1934) is an American-born Canadian poet based in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

Early and personal life Millicent Travis was born into a military family in San Antonio, Texas on 23 September 1934. Her father, United States Army Colonel William Livingston Travis, was a 1933 West Point graduate who won the Distinguished Flying Cross during World War II. Her mother was Elsie Ward Travis. Millicent had one sister. During her childhood the family moved often because of her father's military postings.

She attended Vassar College and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1956. Lauriat Lane Jr. taught English at the University of New Brunswick until 1990 and was named an emeritus professor on his retirement. He died in 2005.

In 1967, M. Travis Lane was named an honorary research associate in the English department of the University of New Brunswick. She has taught courses in contemporary American poetry and West Indian writing, as well as English survey courses. She has also been an external reader for several theses and a reviewer for periodicals including The Fiddlehead. Between 1969 and 2015, she has published 15 solo books and chapbooks, and her work has appeared in more than 30 anthologies. Her 1980 book Divinations and Shorter Poems won the inaugural Pat Lowther Award for the year's best book of poetry by a Canadian woman. Her other awards include the Banff Centre Bliss Carman Poetry Award for her poem "The Safety Net". In 2003, she was awarded the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in English Literature for "outstanding contribution to the arts in New Brunswick by a native or resident New Brunswicker".

Lane's output is various in form. Her fellow poet, editor and critic Jeanette Lynes lists "long narrative poems..., dialogic poems composed in dramatic structures; spare, epigrammatic poems; ekphrasis poems; and open-form lyrics", along with "visual poems and epistolary forms" among the forms her work has taken. Lynes notes that Lane's "primary compositional investment" is in "the sonic elements of language—noise, the play of sound" rather than in the subject matter of the poem. Lane has said that Alden Nowlan was the most influential of the Maritime provinces poets on her work. 2016: winner, Lieutenant-Governor's Award for High Achievement in English Literary Arts