Alice Goodman

Alice Goodman, Lady Hill is an American poet and librettist. She is also an Anglican priest, working in England.

Biography

Goodman was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and attended and graduated from Breck School. She studied English and American literature at Harvard University, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1980, and Girton College, Cambridge, graduting with a further BA in 1982. During the 1980s she published poems in venues such as Poetry and the London Review of Books. She received her Master of Divinity degree from the Boston University School of Theology in 1997. She has written the libretti for two of the operas of John Adams and the text of a cantata by Tarik O'Regan. 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. From 2000 to 2001, she trained for ordination at Ripon College Cuddesdon. She was ordained in the Church of England as a deacon in 2001 and as a priest in 2002. In 2006, Alice Goodman took up the post of chaplain at Trinity College, Cambridge, and in 2011 became Rector of a group of parishes in Cambridgeshire including Fulbourn.
Goodman married the noted English poet Geoffrey Hill in 1987. The couple has one daughter, Alberta.