Space Between: Selected Poems

Following her acclaimed memoir, "Being a Rockefeller, Becoming Myself," Eileen Rockefeller’s debut selection of poems, Space Between, invites you to join her private relationships with people, nature, and spirit. Her poems move you beneath the surface of everyday experience.

Rockefeller navigates her unconscious mind as if she had one eye open under water, the other above. She brings shifting patterns of light and dark to poems brimming with intimacy and generosity, hurt and healing, lovers and loved ones, and most of all with the ever-present thrum of the natural world.

Eileen Rockefeller is an author, public speaker, and venture philanthropist.

Eileen is a visionary catalyst in the fields of mind/body health, social and emotional learning, and innovative philanthropy for clean energy. As founder of the Institute for the Advancement of Health in 1981, she pioneered broad acceptance of mind/body interactions in health and disease. She foresaw the related need for social and emotional learning (SEL) as an integral part of education, prompting Daniel Goleman’s bestseller, Emotional Intelligence, and the co-founding of CASEL (Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning) in 1994. She and her husband, Paul, founded the Growald Family Fund in 2007 to help reduce climate change by transitioning the energy sector to clean alternatives.

Eileen was a founding chair of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors (2000), and is chair of her family’s generational association. She speaks internationally on topics relating to legacy, family, and philanthropy, leading discussions around the values that have helped keep the Rockefeller family together for seven generations.

Eileen is the youngest daughter of David and Peggy Rockefeller, and a great-grand-daughter of John D. Rockefeller. She has two adult sons and lives with her husband on an organic farm in Vermont.

She received her BA from Middlebury College in 1974 and her MA from Lesley College in 1976.