Jeremy Ingalls was born Mildred Dodge Jeremy Ingalls in Massachusetts in 1911. She received Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Tufts University and was a scholar of Chinese and English literature. She was for some years Resident Poet, Professor of Asian Studies, and later head of the English Department at Rockford College. She also taught at Western College in Ohio.
In 1941 Ingalls’ book of poems The Metaphysical Sword appeared in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, edited by Stephen Vincent Benet. Mr. Benet wrote in his preface of the poet’s difference from most young poets in her writing about “spiritual experience.”
In 1943 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to work on her long poem “The Thunder Saga of Tahl,” published in 1945 by Knopf. On December 1, 1932 she read her poetry in the Harriet Monroe Library. Ingalls also wrote books of prose: A Book of Legends (1941) and The Galilean Way (1945) and translated several Chinese titles.
Ingalls retired to Tucson, Arizona in the 1960s and died there in 2000.