Alice Goodman | |
Birth Place: | St. Paul, Minnesota |
Occupation: | Librettist, priest |
Nationality: | American |
Genre: | poetry, opera |
Notableworks: | Nixon In China, The Death of Klinghoffer |
Spouse: | Sir Geoffrey Hill |
Children: | 1 |
Alice Goodman, Lady Hill (born 1958[1]) is an American poet and librettist. She is also an Anglican priest, working in England.[2]
Goodman was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and attended and graduated from Breck School.She was educated at Harvard University and Girton College, Cambridge, where she studied English and American literature. During the 1980s she published poems in venues such as Poetry[3] and the London Review of Books.[4] She received her Master of Divinity degree from the Boston University School of Theology. She has written the libretti for two of the operas of John Adams (Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer) and the text of a cantata by Tarik O'Regan (A Letter of Rights).[5] Goodman resumed writing with John Adams on the opera Doctor Atomic, but withdrew from this project after a year.
She was raised as a Reform Jew, and converted to Christianity in 1989, as an adult.[6] [7] In 2006, Alice Goodman took up the post of chaplain at Trinity College, Cambridge,[8] and in 2011 became Rector of a group of parishes in Cambridgeshire including Fulbourn.[9]
Goodman married the noted English poet Geoffrey Hill in 1987. The couple has one daughter, Alberta.[10]