June 3, 1899 [Indianapolis, Indiana]–May 27, 1987 [Calistoga, California]
June Hildegarde Flanner Monhoff was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, to Frank Flanner, Indiana’s first licensed embalmer and noted philanthropist — the Flanner House, social service center for the African American community, is still in existence today — and Mary Ellen Hockett. Her older sister was Janet Flanner, Paris correspondent for the New Yorker from 1925 until her retirement in 1975. Hildegarde Flanner attended Sweet Briar College in Virginia before moving to California in 1919 to attend the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied poetry with Witter Bynner. Her poem “Young Girl” won the Emily Chamberlain Cook Prize in 1920; a volume, Young Girl and Other Poems, appeared the same year. After the Berkeley fire of 1923, due to which she and her mother lost all of their possessions, she moved to Southern California. She married architect Frederick Monhoff in 1926 (Monhoff, also a noted artist, provided woodcuts for several of Flanner’s books). Flanner was one of the most recognized Southern California poets in the 30s and 40s, with poems appearing in The Nation, The New Republic and Poetry (Chicago). She was named the New Directions Poet of the Month in 1942. Flanner and Monhoff spent their later years on their property in Calistoga, Napa Valley, California, though maintained close ties with the Los Angeles literary community.
