| Josephine Spencer Born in Salt Lake City, Josephine Spencer was the daughter of Daniel and Emily Spencer. A somewhat shy but highly imaginative child, Josephine entertained her friends with plays and stories she created. She lived a comfortable life with her family in the same neighborhood as Emmeline B. Wells and was good friends with Wells’s daughter Annie. Another neighbor was the elderly poet Sarah Carmichael, whose talent she admired from a distance and whose fence she and Annie would peek through. An excellent student and avid reader, she helped organize one of Salt Lake City's first literary societies, "Azalia." October 1890 marked the beginning of Spencer’s prolific writing career. By summer 1893 she had published forty-three poems and five short stories in Utah journals and had won prizes in 1894 for two short stories and an article. Songs and Flowers of the Wasatch included two of her poems, one of them being featured with other fragments of verse by highly respected poets Eliza R. Snow, Sarah Carmichael, Emmeline B. Wells, and Hannah T. King. A single woman, she began writing for the Deseret Evening News, where she turned a small society column into a full-page overview of the world of women and eventually became the paper’s society editor. In 1895 she published a book of short stories called The Senator from Utah and Other Tales of the Wasatch in which she addressed labor issues, an unconventional topic among Mormon writers of the period. From 1902 until her death in 1928 she published more than sixty poems and seventy-two short stories, marking her as one of Mormondom's most productive poets and writers. Devoted to literary work, she was for a long time society editor for the Deseret News and represented that paper at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. [adapted from Discoveries: Two Centuries of Poems by Mormon Women, 100-101] Included in 75 Significant Mormon Poets View Works by this Person | |
| Birth Date | 30 April 1861 |
| Death Date | 28 October 1928 |
| Birth Place | Salt Lake City, Utah |
| Parents | Daniel Spencer and Emily Shafter Thompson Spencer |
| Education | At least 2 terms at the University of Deseret |
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