October 5, 1918 [Los Angeles, California] – April 24, 2009 [Santa Rosa, California]
Emblen was born in Imperial, Los Angeles County. He married Betty Jane Mitchell, an artist born in New Mexico who moved to Los Angeles before 1935 (they divorced in 1971; Emblen married two more times). In Los Angeles, he worked for the Los Angeles City News Service. Emblen served as a sonar man in the Navy during World War II; he returned to college afterwards on the GI Bill. Emblen joined the English department of Santa Rosa Junior College in 1959, retiring in 1988, and became Sonoma County’s first poet laureate in 1999. He also wrote the first biography of Peter Mark Roget, the thesaurus editor, published in 1969. He co-wrote with his first wife, Betty, The Palomino Boy, a young people’s novel about a Mexican-American child, published by Viking Press, New York, in 1948. There Are Seagulls on Our Lawn (1947), illustrated by Betty, reflects his training as a botanist. Lifelong friends included Donald Hall, Robert Bly, and William Stafford.
