Nancy Luce

Born on August 23, 1814, Nancy Luce lived in West Tisbury, Massachusetts, on Martha’s Vineyard. She is remembered as a poet and folk artist whose life was shaped by hardship: after the deaths of her parents, she lived with chronic illness and became largely homebound at the family farmhouse.

Luce wrote and sold small pamphlets of her poems, many of them centered on her daily life, her grief, and the hens she lovingly named and mourned. That unusual mix of plainspoken feeling, humor, and sorrow gave her work a voice unlike anyone else’s.

She died on April 9, 1890. Though she spent much of her life in relative obscurity, her writing has endured because it feels so direct and human, offering a rare glimpse into 19th-century island life and the imagination of a singular American writer.