About Polly Ingraham

Brief Biography

Back in 2011, when Polly launched a blog called, “The Panorama of a Pastor’s Wife,” she had a hunch that her perspective would be slightly unusual.

A quick search will bring up many blogs of church-going pastors’ wives from various faiths and different parts of the country. Since Polly was almost a complete stranger to organized religion when she married her husband (now an Episcopal bishop) 30 years ago, she had a lot of learning to do. She is still asking questions, and still doing a lot of wondering.

Her own work life has also had a double quality: almost equal parts classroom English teaching and managing job training/career development programs for adults and teenagers. Currently she works in a New Hampshire high school, managing the “School to Career” program there. Her experience in education has provided her with a particular sensitivity to the disturbing disparities that persist between different kinds of schools in this country. Through a local non-profit organization, she was fortunate to serve as a mentor to one girl as she made her way through middle and high school. They even flew to California to attend a national conference bringing together youth programs from all over the country.

Having grown up immersed in the natural world – a bird watcher even! — Polly is always eager to learn about science, admiring people who really do science. Toddling around while four older brothers and their friends played countless games outside, she imbibed a love for sports early and has maintained it through her adult years. She and her husband raised three children in two different New England college towns, moving to quieter New Hampshire a decade ago, just as their kids were setting forth.

Writing off the Blog

Polly earned a Master’s degree over five summers at the Bread Loaf School of English. Later, she attended various writing programs: the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, Wesleyan University Writers Conference, the New York State Writers Institute and Madeline Island School of the Arts. From 2017 to 2018, she enrolled in the intensive “Memoir Incubator” program at Grub Street in Boston, where she completed the first draft of the memoir that will be published this coming June.

Her work has appeared in The Daily Hampshire Gazette, The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, Tikkun, The Concord Monitor, Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, and on National Public Radio. An excerpt of the memoir-in-progress was nominated by Unleash Press for a Pushcart Prize in 2023. She had an essay included in Fast Fierce Women (2022), an anthology of nonfiction edited by Gina Barreca and published by Woodhall Press; she will have another essay in the forthcoming Fast Famous Women, another anthology in that same series.