Judith Kitchen—a novelist, poet, essayist, critic, editor, and teacher—died of cancer at age 73 in early November. She was at her home in Port Townsend, Washington, with her husband, Stan Sanvel Rubin, with whom Kitchen co-directed the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.

In an obituary for the late author, Los Angeles Times book critic David Ulin called her last book of nonfiction, The Circus Train, “one of the most astonishing extended essays I’ve read,” and described one cited passage as a “miracle” in its bold-eyed description of mortality.

“Even from a distance, Kitchen redefined death for me, or at least, how we might face death with courage and grace,” Ulin wrote. “This is not to say she wasn’t frightened; ‘[W]ill thinking be my solace, or my curse?’ she wonders in The Circus Train. ‘I have relied on the brain—its ticking and tockings—for an entire lifetime. Can I trust it to take me easily into death, or will it resist, fighting the body until the bitter end?’”

Kitchen authored several books, including, most recently, The Circus Train (2014); Half in Shade (2012), a book of nonfiction; The House on Eccles Road (2002), a novel, which received the S. Mariella Gable Prize in Fiction from Graywolf Press; and Distance and Direction (2002), a collection of essays. She also received two Pushcart Prizes, the Lillian Fairchild Award, the Anhinga Prize for Poetry, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

In addition to teaching in the Rainier Writing Workshop, Kitchen served as advisory and contributing editor of the Georgia Review, where her regular poetry reviews were published, and on the Artists Advisory Board for the New York Foundation for the Arts. She served as a nonfiction reviewer for Water~Stone Review (see Water~Stone’s executive editor Mary Rockcastle’s obituary for Kitchen), and edited a number of anthologies, including, most recently, The Poets Guide to the Birds (2009), which she co-edited with former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser.

“Judith Kitchen… delivered good deeds and good works far and wide, as a writer, as an editor, as a teacher, and as a model citizen of high-minded literary living and giving,” said AWP’s executive director David Fenza. “She was one of our better angels.”

For its upcoming May/Summer issue, the Writer’s Chronicle magazine will publish an interview with Judith Kitchen.