M. Bernetta Quinn

Bernetta Quinn studied at College of Saint Teresa, The Catholic University of America and University of Wisconsin–Madison. The field of work recorded is Catholic Church and modernist poetry. Employment is recorded with College of Saint Teresa, Allen University and Norfolk State University.

• Religion — Roman Catholic • Name — M. Bernetta Quinn • Honorific Prefix — Sister • Honorific Suffix — OSF • Born — 19 September 1915 • Birthplace — Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, U.S. • Birth Name — Viola Roselyn Quinn • Died — 24 February 2003 • Place of death — Rochester, Minnesota, U.S.

She was born Viola Roselyn Quinn in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, on September 19, 1915, to Ellen M. Foran Quinn, a native of Ireland, and Bernard Franklin Quinn, a native of Wisconsin. In 1934, she entered the Franciscan Sisters of the Congregation of Our Lady of Lourdes at St. Francis Parish in Lake Geneva. She professed her first vows in 1937. She earned a bachelor's degree in English at the College of Saint Teresa in Winona, Minnesota, in 1942. In 1944, she earned an M.A. in English at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.. In 1952, she defended her dissertation and earned a doctorate in English from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her dissertation was excerpted in The Sewanee Review. She also studied abroad, attending the International Yeats Summer School in Sligo, Ireland.

Quinn wrote poetry all her life, and it began appearing in print in the 1940s. In 1949, she published "Explanation" in College English, and in 1959 she published "For Ruth Wallerstein Who Died in England, April 1958" there. Flannery O'Connor, a Catholic who attended daily Mass, spoke highly of "the Sister at Minneapolis that writes such good poetry". Quinn corresponded with O'Connor and her mother Regina. Quinn's poem, "Children Carrying Wood", appeared in Art Journal in 1962, and "In Branches of Spruce" in The Sewanee Review in 1963.

She had significant letter-writing correspondences with major literary figures including Flannery O'Connor and her mother Regina; novelists Caroline Gordon, Doris Betts, Sylvia Wilkinson, Peter Taylor, Shelby Stephenson, Robie Macauley, and Robert Penn Warren; writer and painter Guy Davenport; the poets Denise Levertov, Gibbons Ruark, Grace DiSanto, Fred Chappell, James Laughlin, Robert Lowell, Robert Bly, Seamus Heaney, James Wright, Wallace Stevens, Richard Wilbur, and Allen Tate; the Italian-American poet and translator Mary de Rachewiltz (daughter of Ezra Pound), and violinist Olga Rudge (Pound's longtime companion); critic Frank Tuohy; and philosopher Donald Davidson. Her papers are in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and the Wilson Special Collections Library of UNC-Chapel Hill.

In 1983, she retired to Assisi Heights in Rochester, Minnesota, and marked her Franciscan diamond jubilee in 1997. She died on February 24, 2003, leaving an unfinished draft of Pilgrimage to the Stars, a book for children about Dante's Divine Comedy, which is housed in UNC-Chapel Hill's special collections.